I found the manuscript by accident. That's the thing I keep coming back to — I wasn't looking for it. I was looking for a secondary source on Victorian narrative theory, and I pulled the wrong book off the shelf, and inside the back cover was a folded manuscript page with a name I recognized.

The name was D. Cross. My professor. The man who had spent the entire semester telling us that anonymous authorship was a coward's choice.

The manuscript was from "The Obsidian Letters" — a wildly controversial literary series that had been published anonymously for three years, that had been banned in two countries, that had been the subject of three academic papers debating whether it was brilliant or dangerous, and that had sold four million copies without anyone knowing who wrote it.

I stood in the library stacks with the manuscript page in my hand and I thought: he wrote it. Professor Damian Cross, who taught Advanced Literary Theory with the precision of a surgeon and the patience of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by anything, had written the most provocative anonymous literary series of the decade.

I should have put it back. I should have pretended I hadn't seen it. I should have done the sensible, uncomplicated thing.