Subject: QUERY – The Widow's Reign (Adult Psychological Thriller, 117K).

CW: Strong language, suicide, cyberbullying

Arlene opened the next email. Subject, Query – Romantasy 120K words.

One email down, 1117 to go.

“I hope this isn’t another version of moody girl fucks a werewolf.” She said to nobody.

Her assistant, Cam, looked up from his desk outside the glass wall. He raised one eyebrow like it was a well-practiced tic.

"Was it?" he asked.

Arlene didn’t answer. She clicked the email open. The salutation was promising—no “To Whom It May Concern,” no glittery gifs or bios written in the third person. Just a clean, desperate pitch from someone who'd read the submission guidelines and maybe cried over them a little.

She scanned. Fae kingdom. Cursed prince. A warrior-girl with violet eyes and a tragic backstory involving horses.

“Close,” she muttered. “She fucks a banshee.”

Cam snorted. “At least it’s not reverse harem again.”

Arlene rolled her neck. She could still feel the ghost of yesterday’s migraine, parked like a gremlin behind her right eye.

“The day isn’t over.”

Cam held up a can of sparkling water like a peace offering. She waved it off.

“Do you have wine?”

Cam laughed and shook his head.

Email number two. Subject: Literary Masterpiece in the Style of Bukowski.

“Oh, good,” Arlene muttered. “Another drunk womanizer feeling sorry for himself.”

She marked it Pass – tone mismatch and dropped it into the black hole of form rejections.

Cam tilted his head. “Why do you even still do this? Just start a Substack and do your thing.”

Arlene didn’t answer right away. She glanced at the framed photo on her desk—two girls with freckles and crooked teeth, laughing on a beach. One was her daughter. The other had written a manuscript once. A good one. An agent just like Arlene had passed on it. Said the market wasn’t ready.

Maybe it wasn’t. But Arlene had given up at that point.

She clicked open email number three. Subject: QUERY – The Widow's Reign (Adult Psychological Thriller, 117K).

Her eyes caught first paragraph of the synopsis.

“This novel is not a redemption arc. It’s a descent—a study of what happens when two predators mistake fascination for connection. It subverts the typical “cop and criminal” trope. Instead of opposites attracting, it’s about attracting like, two fractured psyches locked in a deadly dance.”

Arlene sat up. Just a little.

“Cam,” she said, without looking up.

“Yeah?”

“Hold my calls.”

She scoured the writing sample attached, the first twenty-five pages. The prose was clean. Surgical with no wasted words. No dreamy metaphors or clumsy exposition. Just steel-thread narrative and characters that felt like real people. Subtext so subtlety obvious that each passage felt like an easter egg.

She picked up her pen, a Mont Blanc, a gift from her attorney brother and scratched out a note.

Uses a lot of similes. Too many? They all work though!!

It was strong work. She was hooked, the dialogue was realistic and the characters were three-dimensional. Editorially there was nothing to grumble about.

Arlene had been burned by shallow brilliance before. A fantastic writing sample, edited to death, only to have the manuscript fall flat. The writer choosing to spend their entire budget on line-editing rather than developmental editing.

She requested the full manuscript.

The manuscript arrived less than three minutes later. No follow-up, no “thank you for your interest,” no polite delay to feign humility. Just a new email.

Subject: Widow’s Reign – Full Manuscript (As Requested)

She opened the file. Same clean formatting. No headers, no footer fluff. Just precise words, flayed and surgical.

She told herself she’d read a chapter. Two, maybe. Just enough to confirm the sample wasn’t a fluke.

She finished it just after 3:00 a.m.

Somewhere between Chapter Thirty-One and Thirty-Two, Cam had gone home, and she hadn’t noticed. Her coffee had gone cold. Her phone had buzzed once and stopped. The office was dark except for her desk lamp, and the world had narrowed to one story.

She sat back, spine aching, eyes dry and wide.

It was perfect. Not in a glossy, MFA-darling kind of way, but in the way of something raw and inevitable. Like a confession someone carved into a wall before dying. It knew things. About power. About guilt. About longing that didn’t want to be cured.

The final paragraph was a mirror—figuratively and literally. She could see herself in it. Too clearly.

“Some predators don’t chase because they’re hungry. They chase because they’re lonely. Because they’re terrified the thing running is the only one who understands them."

She exhaled. Her hands were trembling.

And she had forgotten to go home and feed her cat. Her daughter was with her dad this week. It was a fifteen-minute walk home but she was back at the office at 8am, meaning tomorrow, today rather, was going to be a bitch.

#

The next morning, she cornered Paul, her boss, before he finished his first latte.

“It’s incredible,” she said, sliding the printed pages across his desk. “Uncomfortable. Brilliant. It’s not market-safe, and I don’t care.”

Paul blinked at the title page. “The Widow’s Reign?”

“I’m putting my name on it. If it bombs, I’ll take the hit.”

He gave her a look, half curious, half cautious. “You haven’t backed anything this hard in years.”

“I know.”

She went back to her office. Reread the manuscript twice that week.

She stopped taking other meetings. Let Cam screen everything.

She looked at her desk calendar, the old-fashioned one made out of real ex-trees. There was a quote written there, in her handwriting. From the manuscript. She didn’t remember copying it down. Didn’t remember seeing that line before at all.

The most dangerous thing about wearing a mask too long isn’t that people believe it’s your face. It’s that you start forgetting what’s underneath.

Paul called her the next morning. Early. Earlier than usual.

“We’re in,” he said, voice low and even. “Legal’s drafting the boilerplate. I want this fast-tracked for Frankfurt.”

Arlene leaned back in her chair. Relief, pride, and something colder coiled together in her chest. “We’re repping The Widow’s Reign?”

“We are. I’ve already carved out a slot for it at the front of the catalog. Nice work, Arlene.”

She hung up and stared at her screen for a moment, almost hesitant.

Then she opened a reply window.

Subject: The Widow’s Reign – Representation Offer

Dear J,

I’m thrilled to officially offer representation. We’d love to move forward and prepare a formal submission strategy. Please confirm you’re still interested so we can proceed with contracts.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Arlene Shaw

Senior Literary Agent

Salt & Finch Literary

She hit send.

The response came back before her outbox refreshed.

Subject: sorority.docx

No body text. No greeting.

Just an attachment.

Arlene opened it.

#

Sorority.docx

It started on a Thursday.

Four girls. All upperclassmen.

They wore glitter and crop tops and a kind of privilege that shimmered in the dark.

On the walk home, they found him—

a quiet boy with big glasses and the kind of shoulders that curled inward from too many apologies.

He was carrying a library book. They didn’t ask what kind.

“Come party with us,” one of them said. He smiled, awkward but grateful.

They took him back to their dorm. Not to party.

They posed him like a joke.

Put lipstick on his mouth. Made him hold a bottle of wine between his legs.

Arlene straddled his lap and whispered something obscene while Natalie filmed it.

He laughed. Sort of. The way someone laughs when they don’t know how not to.

One of the other girls commented later, that boy’s too polite to stick up for himself.

The TikTok was thirty seconds long.

“When the library boy thinks it’s his lucky night 💋📚💀”

#nerdnight

#bethegirl

#heblushed

Pink text. Club lights. Shaky laughter.

They’d all watched the view count climb over pizza the next night. A million in twelve hours.

Three by morning.

The comments were still burned into her memory.

“I’d let him do my taxes.”

“Why is he lowkey cute tho??”

“Plot twist: he cried after.”

“Someone check on this boy fr.”

“The way he just sat there…”

“this feels… off?”

“LMFAOOOOO 😭😭😭”

One comment had haunted her for weeks afterward before she forced herself to stop checking:

“That smile isn’t real.”

He disappeared three days later.

Dropped out. Vanished from campus.

Arlene never saw him again.

#

The last line made her stomach clench.

She scrolled down.

A hyperlink sat below the story.

Small-Town Tragedy: Local Man Dies by Suicide Amid Online Harassment

Arlene hesitated. Clicked.

A local newspaper. Dated six years ago.

The photo was blurry but unmistakable. The same boy. The glasses. The fragile posture.

Name: Jared Combs. Age: 23. Cause of Death: Suicide.

He had gone viral briefly for what classmates described as a “funny TikTok prank.”

He was buried in a cemetery Arlene had driven past once, visiting a campus she used to recruit from.

She didn’t remember the name. Didn’t remember the boy.

But the manuscript did.

Arlene stared at the name.

Jared Combs.

The obituary was short. The kind written by a paper that didn’t really want to dwell on the details. There was a single photo: yearbook-style, with a crooked tie and hopeful eyes. The kind of photo nobody picks for themselves, but that parents think captures “potential.”

It hit her like a forgotten bruise.

Not the name. The posture.

That hunched, folded-in way he stood. Like he wanted to leave the room without having to move.

She remembered the night in pieces—glitter that wouldn't come off, the taste of cinnamon schnapps, a dorm floor sticky with spilled vodka and ring lights. And Jared.

He’d looked so grateful when they invited him along. Like a dog let inside during a storm.

They hadn't meant to be cruel. That’s what she’d told herself afterward.

They were drunk. Young. Bored.

He was weird.

And they didn’t know—not really—what would happen when the video blew up. Or what it would do to him.

The TikTok account had belonged to Natalie, who ended up married to a hedge fund manager in Westport. Kayla had gone into nonprofit work. Mia never talked about that night at all.

And Arlene? She’d deleted the video from her phone. That was supposed to be enough.

Her chest felt tight now.

She closed the tab. Reopened the Word doc.

There was new text at the bottom.

Some stories never get published.

They just wait.

For the right reader.

Welcome back, Arlene.

Her blood ran cold.

She yanked her hand away from the mouse like it had burned her.

The document closed itself.

Her office lights flickered. Once. Then held.

Cam knocked gently on the doorframe.

“You okay?”

Arlene looked up. Her mouth was dry.

“I—” she began, then stopped.

He frowned. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

She swallowed.

“No,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “I think a ghost saw me.”

For the rest of the day, Arlene couldn’t focus. Not on emails. Not on Cam asking about contracts. Not on Paul cc’ing her about Frankfurt timelines.

The manuscript—the story—was still open in her mind. Like a gas leak. Silent, invisible, deadly.

That night, she couldn’t sleep. She tried. Tried tea, wine, silence, white noise. She kept seeing Jared’s face. Not the blurry obituary photo, but how he’d looked that night: confused, nervous, trying to laugh along as they drew hearts on his cheeks in eyeliner.

The guilt didn’t just visit her. It moved in.

The next morning, she walked into the nearest police precinct with dark circles under her eyes and a printed copy of sorority.docx in her trembling hands.

“I was part of this,” she said to the officer behind the desk. “We didn’t mean to—but we humiliated him. We ruined him. He—he killed himself.”

The officer read the first page, then frowned.

“Ma’am, there’s no open investigation. No charges were ever filed. This incident happened over six years ago?”

“I know,” she whispered, almost pleading. “But it’s wrong. It was me. We destroyed him and just kept living. I don’t want to keep living like this.”

He offered her a pamphlet on counseling services.

She left shaking, ashamed, furious.

Back in her apartment, the manuscript was gone from her laptop. She checked her folders. The cloud. Her backup drives.

Nothing.

But when she opened her desk drawer, it was there.

Printed. Bound. Sitting on top of her contracts and royalty reports like it belonged.

The cover page read only:

The Widow’s Reign

Final Edition

By Jared Combs

She broke.

She cried for the first time in years. Full-body sobs. Not grief. Not fear. Recognition.

She didn’t eat for two days. Barely slept. Cam tried to call. So did Paul. She didn’t answer.

Eventually, she called 911 on herself. Said she felt unsafe. Said she didn’t know where the story ended and she began.

They brought her in gently.

The facility was clean. Quiet. She didn’t fight it.

She spent her days staring out the window and asking the nurses to check her mail, just in case something arrived.

One morning, it did.

A plain envelope. No return address.

Inside was a single page, typed.

Every good story has a reckoning, Arlene.

This was yours.

Thanks for reading.

– J.