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“Oh no. The publisher won’t care. It’s added publicity. Doesn’t matter if this person is a reader or not—it gets Zane’s name and his book out there. If they find out about this website, they might weigh the ethics of leveraging it. Discreetly, of course. Ultimately, for them, it comes down to whatever sells books.”
“So this is you… preparing us? Warning us?”
It wasn’t. Daphne could tell by Sakura’s tone. She was pissed off, and so far had shown no signs of being the sort of person who gets angry at her boss and takes it out on everyone around her.
“These people will find Chris Stanton,” Sakura said. “It wasn’t easy. I did an image search, and it took hours to track down that photo. That’s buying you a bit of time. Even after I had that, I couldn’t dig up much on Chris, and believe me, I am an expert. There’s nothing worse than being assigned to a new author and discovering blackface costume photos on Facebook. I don’t just search. I scour. With Zane, there was nothing, obviously. Chris is nearly as invisible. If he has a social media presence, it’s locked down under a username, and ‘Chris Stanton’ is common enough that it took me two hours just to dig up a smattering of information.”
“Okay.”
“But that was enough to find out a bit about Chris’s hobbies and such. You know what I didn’t find listed there? Writing. Even when I dug back as far as his high-school yearbook. Not a single mention of him taking any interest in writing.”
Now Daphne had to force out the word. “Okay.”
“Then there’s you. Daphne McFadden.”
Daphne twitched.
Sakura continued, “You’re an architect.”
“Yes, I never said this was my career—”
“And you’re nearly as elusive online. For millennials, you two either spend very little time online or you’re very private people, with usernames and whatnot. But I did find you. Including this.”
Sakura passed over her phone. Daphne was holding herself so tight she could barely stretch out a hand to take it. She braced herself, looked at the screen, and softly exhaled.
It was something she’d written under her own name. A published piece of writing.
So why the surge of relief? Because it wasn’t even remotely connected to her fiction. It was an article in a regional architectural magazine edited by a friend who’d asked her to contribute.
“Yes, I wrote this article,” Daphne said. “I’m surprised you found it, but I’m not sure why it’s—”
Sakura reached over and scrolled up to the brief bio line at the bottom.
Daphne McFadden lives in the Yukon wilderness, where she spends her days dreaming up new ways to build ecofriendly northern homes… and her nights dreaming up new scenes for her northern zombie novel.
Her heart stopped.
When Daphne “became” Zane Remington, she and Nia had combed the internet for anything linking Daphne to Edge or even linking Daphne to writing. There was nothing.
Oh, Daphne was online. More than Chris, who’d admitted he didn’t have any social media profiles. It just wasn’t his thing. He kept in touch with his friends on group chats and such, and if he needed a profile, he had a username.
Chris was an accountant. He didn’t want potential clients googling his name and finding him playing beer pong with college buddies. He had to be the kind of guy they could entrust with their money. Serious, even staid.
Daphne did the same—her social media presence was mostly restricted to friend groups. Yet there was one exception. Writing.
Daphne was a member of at least a dozen online writing communities. And every one of those profiles was completely locked down, with usernames that linked back to email accounts that used those same names.
If she had to put in a “real” name, she used a fake one. The online smokescreen gave her the freedom to speak openly about writing, but she’d always planned to use a pen name, so she’d left nothing connecting her writing life to Daphne McFadden.
Except this.
One line below an article in a very small, very specialized journal.
Daphne hadn’t written that line. Her editor friend had. This friend had known Daphne was writing a zombie novel and added it to the bio line. Daphne had been annoyed. Her friend had teased her about being so secretive and saying it added human interest. So Daphne had let it go and forgotten about it.
Until now.
“Chris Stanton didn’t write Edge, did he?” Sakura said.
