My Memoir Has Been Written by My Enemies

How it begins

Esme Solano discovered her unauthorized memoir in a padded envelope labeled FOR FACT-CHECKING.

A publicity calendar lay beside the envelope. For once, she could not decide which blank square should contain the emergency.

The title was flattering. That was how she knew it would be cruel.

She read the opening page standing in the hallway. By page three, she'd taken off her coat. By page eleven, she had made tea she would not drink.

Her enemies had collaborated.

Not efficiently, if the inconsistent chapter headings were evidence, but with enough shared purpose to produce three hundred pages and an index.

Esme had worked in publicity for thirty years. She knew a campaign when one arrived with endnotes.

She called Owen Hale.

He answered without saying hello.

"You received it."

"There's a chapter called Generosity as a Management Style."

"I argued for a shorter title."

"You edited this?"

A pause.

"Parts of it."

Esme sat down.

Outside, a courier pushed another envelope through the door. Somewhere beyond the window, a man was telling a dog it had already had enough attention. The world continued with the insulting confidence of a place unaware that her life had become a group project.

"Half of this is wrong," she said.

"Which half?"

She looked at the page open on her knee.

An incident she remembered as mentoring appeared under a heading about unpaid work. A speech she'd considered brave was followed by the name of the person who'd lost a job afterward.

"The tone," she said.

Owen waited.

Esme had trained hundreds of clients never to confuse silence with surrender. Now she found it difficult not to fill his with something marketable.

"Come over," she said at last. "Bring a pencil."

"To correct it?"

She looked at the index, where her own name occupied almost an entire column.

"To begin with the parts I keep skipping."