The book was on a shelf between a biography of Nikola Tesla and a guide to raising chickens. She found it because she was looking for the chicken book. The spine read: Mara Linden: A Life Compressed.
She took it down. The cover showed a photograph she had never posed for, of a room she had never been in, wearing clothes she did not own. But it was her face.
She opened to a random page. Chapter 11: "The Year She Stopped Answering." It described, accurately, the period after her father died when she had let her phone go to voicemail for six months. The book knew she had eaten toast every morning during that time. It knew the toast was sourdough. It knew that on the worst days she had eaten it without butter, standing at the counter, and had not tasted it.
She checked the author's name. Raymond Kess. She had never heard of him.
She bought the book. She also bought the chicken guide, because she had come here for the chicken guide and she was not the kind of person who abandoned a plan.
At home she read it in one sitting. Twelve chapters. Her childhood was mostly right. Her mother's name was wrong -- the book said Alice, her mother's name was Helen -- but everything else about her mother was accurate. The way she folded laundry. The specific brand of lavender soap. How she hummed when she thought no one was listening, and stopped the instant she noticed someone was.
The book knew things Mara had not told anyone. That she had once stolen a library book because she could not bear to return it. That she kept a list of every person who had been kind to her, handwritten, in a box under her bed. That the list had forty-seven names.
The list had forty-seven names. She had counted once, in January, to see if the number felt like enough. It did not.
She found Raymond Kess online. He had a small website with no photograph. The bio said he was a writer who specialized in "biographical reconstruction from public and ambient data." His other books were about people she had never heard of.
She emailed him. "I found your book about me. I have some corrections."
He replied within the hour. "Which book? I've written forty-three."
"The one about me. Mara Linden."
"Oh," he wrote. "You're the first one to find it."
They met at a diner. Raymond Kess was shorter than she expected and wore a coat that was too large for him. He ordered coffee and did not drink it.
"How did you know about the toast?" she asked.
"Grief has a pattern," he said. "Everyone thinks their grief is unique. The shape is always the same. Only the details vary."
"The details were right."
"Some of them. Your mother's name was wrong."
"Yes. Alice."
"Helen would have been better," he said, and she could not tell if he was guessing or if he already knew and had chosen wrong deliberately.
"The list," she said. "Under the bed. Forty-seven names. How did you know that?"
"Everyone keeps a list. Not everyone writes it down, but everyone has one. The number is always between thirty and sixty. Below thirty and you would have stopped counting. Above sixty and you would not have started."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
He looked at her coffee, which she had also not drunk.
"The book sold eleven copies," he said. "You were not supposed to be one of them. The books are not for the subjects. They are for the other forty-two people who bought the other forty-two books and recognized themselves in a stranger's life."
"That doesn't make it okay."
"No," he said. "Nothing about it is okay. I am not arguing that it is okay. I am telling you what it is for."
She went home and reread the book. This time she noticed what it got wrong. Not just the name. The book said she was afraid of flying. She was not afraid of flying. She was afraid of airports. The book said she had wanted to be a veterinarian as a child. She had wanted to be a marine biologist. The book said her first kiss was at a party. It was in a parking lot, after a movie neither of them had liked, and neither of them had mentioned it afterward.
The book was maybe sixty percent accurate. The sixty percent was uncanny. The forty percent was someone else's life, or no one's life, pressed into the gaps where Raymond Kess had not been able to see.
She thought about the forty percent. She thought about how a stranger had looked at the shape of her life and filled in the holes with plausible fiction, and how some of the fiction was better than what had actually happened. The parking lot kiss had been awkward and brief. The party kiss Raymond invented sounded warmer.
She was not sure which version of herself she preferred.
She emailed Raymond one more time. "Your book is sixty percent right. The forty percent is someone I would like to have been."
He did not reply for three days. Then:
"That is what all eleven readers said about their own books."