A Soul for a Contract

Act I: The Bookstore Beneath the Storm

The smell of powdered sugar and chicory was thick in the air, sweet and bitter in equal measure.

I sat at a corner table in Café Du Monde, my yellow legal pad spread open before me like a tattered relic from a pre-digital age. Distant emergency sirens and a radio announcement describing a hurricane stronger than Camille expected to hit land before dawn filled my ears.

People rushed past the cafe in clusters, arms full of bottled water, batteries, diapers, and dread.

But I stayed, sipping my coffee, the rim of the mug sticky with powdered sugar.

“Mandatory evacuation in place for Orleans Parish...” the radio had repeated all morning. But I had a story to finish—my story. And after what happened with Mr. Deschamps, hurricanes didn’t frighten me anymore.

I’m not crazy, not exactly. The manuscript I’m about to tell you might make you think otherwise.

I dub it *The Unmaking of Cristin Hughes*, though its title varied. It used to be a novel about an artist in exile, haunted by her muse. Then it became reality.

You see, I was never supposed to be a successful writer.

For twenty years, I wrote in the margins of my life—on napkins during lunch breaks, in

notebooks while babysitting my sister, Marianne’s kids, on typewriters bought from pawn shops and Goodwills across Louisiana. I sent out short stories, query letters, novel excerpts. In return, I received a steady drizzle of rejections: “not the right fit,” “lacked narrative momentum,” “beautifully written, but no market.”

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. By that measure, I was certifiable. But the stories kept arriving in my head, muted and persistent as ghosts, and I couldn’t turn them away.

It was during one of those low, bone-deep defeats that I found him.

A misty rain draped the French Quarter in a dreamlike haze. I had just left Faulkner House Books with a used paperback and a second-hand ache in my chest when I noticed the sign: Hollow & Co. Literary Services. Tattered, the sign hung over the alley. I’d never walked this route before, even though I’d lived here most of my life.

The shop appeared as though it had been built centuries ago and left to deteriorate in the humid climate. The windows were coated in a filmy dust, and the bell above the door didn’t ring when I stepped inside. It gasped.The air was dense with old paper and something older—like iron or ink left too long in the bottle. Shelves stretched toward a shadowed ceiling, stacked with hardcovers in languages I didn’t recognize. No price tags were present. No cash register. Just a long wooden desk near the back, where a man in a three-piece suit was dipping a fountain pen into a deep blue inkwell, priming it for use.

He didn’t look up when I approached. “Miss Solaire,” he said. “You’ve kept me waiting.”

I blinked. “Have we met?”

He smiled, eyes never leaving the pen. “In a manner of speaking. I’m Édouard Descamps. I edit reality.”

I would’ve laughed if he hadn’t said it with such terrifying calm.

“What kind of place is this?” I asked.

“A literary agency of a rare sort,” he said, finally looking at me. His eyes were silver—not gray, not blue, but silver, like molten coin. “We offer contracts to authors with untapped potential. In exchange, their work reaches its... fullest expression.”

He reached beneath the desk and produced a leather-bound folder. Inside was a contract printed on thick cream paper. Someone had already filled in my name at the top.

I laughed. “You’re joking.”

Edouard closed the folder and placed the primed pen beside it. “Success is rarely a joke, Miss Solaire. What we offer is simple: Sign, and you’ll be read. Widely. Wildly. Obsessively. Your books will outsell the classics. You’ll become a household name.”

I crossed my arms. “And what’s the catch?”

“The only kind that matters.”

That was the beginning. The first act. The inciting event. I didn’t sign that day. I walked out into the rain; the folder pressed tightly beneath my arm, my fingers trembling.

It sat on my writing desk for three days, untouched. During those three days, I received four more rejection emails, spilled coffee on my only working laptop, and got a call from my landlord about the overdue rent. On the fourth day, I took out my pen, paused, and signed: Alice R. Solaire.

The next morning, everything changed. I woke up to 623 unread emails.The first subject line read: Congratulations! The Unmaking of Cristin Hughes is a triumph!

By noon, I had three interview requests, a glowing review in The New Yorker, and a request from a producer in L.A. for film rights.

It surpassed my wildest dreams.

Until I saw the newspaper.

The front page bore a photo of a woman I recognized, though I had never met her in real life:

Cristin Hughes, painter, recluse, muse. Only she wasn’t fictional anymore. She was flesh and bone, featured in an article about a surprise solo exhibit in the Garden District titled “Imaginary Landscapes.”

She mirrored the way I’d described her in the novel—the crooked front tooth, the cloud of unruly red curls, the constellation of freckles over her right collarbone.

I dropped the paper and whispered, “No. No, no, no.”

But the story was already complete.

Act II: Cristin in the Flesh

The next day, I walked through the Garden District in a daze of disbelief, clutching the

newspaper like it might vanish if I let go. The gallery wasn’t hard to find. A modest white building with a rust-red door and a hanging sign that read: Maison des Brumes–Featuring the Works of Cristin Hughes.

Vibrant painted canvases hung on the walls inside, making them feel alive. Fog-drenched landscapes, oil-slick skies, faces half-remembered. And at the center of the room stood the woman I had invented—Cristin Hughes herself.

I couldn’t move. She was real. Breathing. Smiling. Her laughter scattered into the gallery air like petals. My throat closed. I had written that laugh.

I watched from behind a column until the small crowd thinned. Then I approached.

“Cristin?”

She turned to me; her eyes were the exact stormy gray I had once imagined. “Yes?” Cristin said.

My mouth went dry. “Sorry, I — I’m a huge admirer of your work.”

She smiled. “Thank you. Are you from here?”“Yes. Yes, born and raised.” I paused. “Cristin, can I ask — how long have you been painting professionally?”

She pondered. “Feels like … not long. A year. It’s strange, but I remember a little from before that. Just flashes. Trees, thunder. A woman’s voice, my mother’s. Everything else begins with color.”

That was when I knew. Knew with a finality that chilled me. She hadn’t existed before the book.

I left the gallery without another word.

Back in my apartment, I poured myself a glass of bourbon and stared at my typewriter. What had I done?

I flipped through my manuscript, searching for the paragraph where I had first described Cristin’s hazy past, her sudden rise, her inability to recall childhood memories. I had written her story, and now she was walking around living it.

I tried to write something new that night. Something light, safe. But my fingers trembled too much to hit the keys.

The next morning, I opened my front door to find a fresh copy of The Times-Picayune and a small envelope. No return address. Just my name. Inside: a note on thick, cream-colored paper.

Miss Solaire,

One story invites another. The world has many pages yet to turn.

— E.D.

Edouard Deschamps.

A bookstore. The contract. The consequence. I had to find him again.

I went back to the alley where Hollow & Co. had been. It vanished. In its place stood an empty lot, fenced off with yellow caution tape and a condemned sign.

I asked the cafe owner next door how long it had been that way.

“Ten years or more,” she said. “Old place caught fire. Shame. Lovely bookshop.”

“But I was just there last week.”

She gave me a polite but wary smile. “You must be thinking of somewhere else.”

Cristin called me that afternoon.I don’t know how she got my number. I don’t remember giving it. But she said, “We need to talk. Please.”

We met at a quaint cafe off Magazine Street. She was nervous, eyes darting, lips dry.

“I read your book,” she said. “The Unmaking of Cristin Hughes. I — I don’t know how to explain this, but it’s like reading someone else’s memory. My memory.”

I said nothing.

She leaned in. “Did you — write me?”

The silence between us throbbed like a bruise. Finally, I nodded.

Tears welled in her eyes. “What does that make me?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But Deschamps does.”

We searched. Online, in archives, in local records. Nothing. No, Édouard Descamps. No Hollow & Co. But more disturbing were the emails I started receiving from readers. Strangers who remembered childhoods I never wrote, marriages that no longer existed, entire timelines that had shifted in the wake of my novel’s release.

Cristin faded — at first. She’d forget names. Then her studio. Then her own birthday. I watched it happen in real time, like a character being unwritten.

I started another book. I didn’t tell anyone. An alternative story where Cristin was a painter with a history, a family, roots that reached into the real world.

I scribbled like I was racing a storm.

But when I went to sign the last page, the pen refused to write.

I looked down.

Someone had already filled in the signature line.

—E.D.

Act III: The Last Page

Cristin stood in my doorway, trembling. Her eyes had gone glassy, as if her edges were being erased in real time.“I don’t want to vanish,” she said. “Please, Ali. You wrote me in the first place, now write me back.”

But the page was already signed.

That night, the hurricane’s winds began to howl down the narrow streets of the Quarter. I lit candles. I opened the windows. I listened to the roar of nature, but none of it frightened me the way the silence inside me did.

I pulled out the yellow legal pad. Not the manuscript. Not the story Deschamps had touched. Just this pad, and a pen that felt familiar. Honest.

I wrote, not fiction, not plot. Just truth.

“I met a woman who wasn’t real, but mattered more than most of the ones who were. I signed a contract that gave me everything I thought I wanted and took everything I didn’t know I’d need.

I rewrote the world and lost myself in the margins.”

Cristin’s name faded from news articles, from gallery walls. But I remembered her. I would always remember her.

Because memory, not manuscript, is what anchors us.

But the guilt wouldn’t leave. Every time I passed a mirror, I half-expected to see her face there, hovering behind mine, waiting. Not angry. Not accusing. Just… watching.

I kept writing. Not stories. Not novels. Just thoughts. Honest thoughts. Paragraphs that wouldn’t sell, ideas that wouldn’t trend. I filled notebook after notebook. Some days, I wrote letters addressed to Cristin, apologizing, explaining, pleading. Other days, I tore the pages out and burned them in the sink.

I returned to the gallery a week later. Maison des Brumes was shuttered. The windows boarded, the door chained. The name had been scraped off the sign, leaving behind a scar of wood. No one remembered the exhibit. No one remembered her. Except me.

I tried to write her back into existence. But everything I put on the page came out wrong— forced, hollow, like a puppet missing its strings. Because now I knew the difference. Words had power, but they also had price. Once spent, there was no refund.

At night, I dreamed of Deschamps. He stood at a typewriter made of bone and gold, the keys clicking out realities with every tap. I asked him why he chose me. He smiled with those silver eyes and said, “You were hungry enough to sign.”

I woke gasping, drenched in sweat, afraid I had written something in my sleep.The storm had come and gone, but something in me had shifted permanently. The streets of New Orleans slowly filled again with music and movement, but to me, it all sounded muffled, like I was listening through glass. I wandered, unseen, through the Quarter, scribbling poems on napkins and walls, trying to leave pieces of Cristin in places only I could find.

One afternoon, I passed a street artist painting on a folding easel. The face she was painting stopped me cold—Cristin. Not exactly. But close enough to make my breath catch.

“Who is she?” I asked.

The artist looked at the canvas. “I don’t know. She just came to me.”

I bought the painting.

I hung it above my writing desk. It was the only thing that felt real anymore.

By dawn, the sky turned bruised and gold. I walked to the levee, the legal pad under my arm, and let the wind carry away the last page.

No contracts. No signatures. Just words.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

The newspaper sat folded neatly on the kitchen table, still damp from the delivery. Marianne Solaire ran her thumb across the headline of the obituaries, her coffee cooling untouched beside her. Her eyes caught on a name she had read a thousand times before, but now felt carved in stone.

Alice R. Solaire, 42, local novelist and resident of the French Quarter, was one of the confirmed fatalities following the landfall of Hurricane Ida.

Marianne blinked hard, reading the line again.

The obituary was eloquent—too eloquent, she thought with a bitter smile. It described Ali’s passion for literature, her hard-won rise to fame with her bestselling novel The Unmaking of Cristin Hughes, and her eccentric devotion to her craft. But it was the final paragraph that stopped Marianne cold:

In an ironic twist that could have leapt from the pages of her fiction, Miss Solaire was found inside the remains of a long-abandoned bookstore: Hollow & Company Literary Services.

Authorities say the structure was unsafe and condemned, closed to the public for nearly two decades. According to city records, the last registered owner was a Mr. Edouard Deschamps— deceased since 1981. Attempts to locate subsequent ownership have yielded no results. It remains a mystery why Miss Solaire entered the building during the storm or how she gained access.Marianne let the paper fall from her hands. The room seemed suddenly quieter. The wind outside rustled the windows, and for a moment, she could almost hear her sister’s voice—telling a story,

just beyond the veil.

It was the kind of silence that didn’t feel empty, but expectant, as though someone unseen had just stepped out of the room. The shadows on the kitchen floor lengthened without cause.

Marianne stood still, not daring to move, as if she might catch one final whisper hidden in the hush. The air held the faint scent of old paper and ink, though nothing around her explained it.

Epilogue

St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans

I’ve always liked this spot. Peaceful, shaded by crepe myrtles, the air thick with the scent of brick dust, jasmine, and ghosts. Death holds little sway here, and I am now among the deceased.

I lean back against my gravestone—fancy that—and flip open my yellow legal pad. The pages are still blank. My silence isn’t from lack of words, but from choosing what to say after your sudden death mid-story.

Marianne read the obituary this morning. I could feel her hands shaking when she reached my name. Alice R. Solaire, 42, novelist and French Quarter eccentric, confirmed among the hurricane’s fatalities. My poor sister. She always worried I’d vanish one day chasing a story that wouldn’t let me go.

She thought the obituary was too eloquent—too neat. I agree. They always are. It listed my novel, my so-called literary triumph, and that I died inside a crumbling old bookstore that hadn’t been open in decades. Hollow & Company. As if it seemed just a strange coincidence.

They even mentioned Edouard Deschamps, which made me laugh out loud up here. Deceased since 1981, the article said. No record of any owner since. No record of anything real, except the story I left behind.

Marianne let the paper fall, I’m sure of it. I felt the shift in her kitchen like a change in the weather. A profound silence surrounded her; memories overwhelmed her grief. She heard me. I know she did. Just beyond the veil.

And Cristin? She’s authentic in a way I never could be. I wonder where she is now—if she’s painting, if someone else has dreamed her into being again. That’s what stories do. They are bleeding. Echoes reverberate. They keep coming back to life.Funny, isn’t it? That something made up, something I wrote in a moment of aching hope, outlives the person who imagined it. Perhaps the true secret is that lasting impact isn’t about recognition. It’s about remembering the world into something that wasn’t there before.

I take a breath I don’t need, press my pen to the page, and begin again