Chapter 5 - The Plagiarism Trap
The television studio in Rockefeller Center was freezing.
They always kept green rooms cold to keep the guests from sweating under the merciless high-definition cameras, but tonight, the chill felt surgical.
I sat in the makeup chair, watching the stylist apply a dusting of translucent powder to my temples. In the mirror, I barely recognized the woman staring back at me. For twenty-nine years, Graham had preferred me in beige. Soft pastels. Simple pearls. Hair pulled back into a low, demure chignon that signaled to the world that I was an accessory—expensive, tasteful, and entirely silent.
Tonight, I wore a bespoke tuxedo suit cut from midnight-blue velvet. The lapels were silk, sharp as switchblades. My dark hair was swept back, dramatic and severe, highlighting the high Pierce cheekbones that Graham had spent decades trying to dim.
Julian stepped into the dressing room, closing the door behind him.
"He took the bait," Julian whispered.
I didn't turn around. "Did he bring his 'evidence'?"
"He arrived thirty minutes ago," Julian chuckled, leaning against the doorframe. "He's in green room C, pacing a trench into the carpet. He brought two leather-bound binders full of forged notes, a printout of emails he claims you sent him, and a junior attorney from a strip-mall firm in Queens who looks like he’s about to vomit from sheer terror."
"And Celeste?"
"Even better," Julian said, his smile sharpening. "Celeste found out Graham was coming here. She showed up at the security desk fifteen minutes ago, demanding entry. She claims Graham stole her personal diary to manufacture his 'creative notes.' The network producers, smelling an absolute ratings bloodbath, put her in green room D."
"Three green rooms," I murmured, watching the stylist finish my lipstick—a dark, uncompromising crimson. "A tragedy in three acts."
"Are you ready for this, Evelyn?" Julian asked, his voice softening slightly, shedding the lawyer’s armor for a rare moment of genuine concern. "Once this airs live, there is no retreating. You won't just be a private novelist anymore. You will be a public icon of retribution."
I stood up, smoothing the front of my velvet jacket.
"Julian," I said, meeting his eyes in the mirror. "I spent twenty-nine years retreating. I spent twenty-nine years making myself smaller so Graham could feel like a giant. I am done being small."
Ten minutes later, I walked out onto the soundstage.
The roar of the audience was immediate, thunderous, and visceral. The host, an affable late-night comedian named David Sterling who usually traded in lighthearted celebrity banter, stood up from his desk and walked all the way to the stage entrance to take my hand.
"Ladies and gentlemen," David shouted into the microphone above the cheering crowd, "the woman of the hour, the month, and quite possibly the decade—Evelyn Pierce, otherwise known to millions around the globe as Aurelia Wren!"
The crowd rose to their feet. I smiled, dipped my head in graceful acknowledgment, and took my seat in the guest chair.
Across the studio, hidden behind the high-intensity monitors and the bank of studio cameras, I could see the monitors feeding the backstage rooms.
In Green Room C, Graham was sitting on the edge of a sofa, staring at the screen with his binders clutched against his ribs like a shield.
"Evelyn," David Sterling began, leaning on his elbows, his eyes dancing with curiosity. "I think it’s fair to say that the literary world has never seen a reveal quite like last night. Social media has completely melted down. The phrase 'Keep it warm' is currently being projected onto the side of a building in London."
The audience laughed and cheered.
"It was an impromptu moment, David," I said smoothly, my voice calm and conversational. "Sometimes, the right words simply present themselves."
"Well, they certainly did," David said. "But as you know, today has brought some... shall we say, conflicting claims. In the last twelve hours, your estranged husband, Graham Alder, has gone to several major publications claiming that the genius behind *The Glass Orchard* wasn't entirely yours. He claims that he provided the concepts, the outlines, and that he was, in fact, the creative architect of Aurelia Wren."
The audience let out a collective, scornful groan.
David held up a hand, silencing them, and looked at me. "How do you respond to that, Evelyn?"
"I don't respond to rumors, David," I said, folding my hands elegantly in my lap. "I respond to evidence. And since I knew Mr. Alder would attempt to rewrite history—just as he attempted to rewrite our marriage—I brought something with me tonight."
I reached beside my chair and lifted an old, battered leather satchel.
The studio went dead silent. The cameras zoomed in tight.
"This," I said, resting my hand on the cracked leather, "is my grandfather’s dispatch bag from the Second World War. For nine years, it lived in the floorboards beneath the clawfoot tub in the third-floor guest bathroom of Alder Manor—the one room my husband never set foot in because he claimed the plumbing was too dated."
I unbuckled the brass clasp and reached inside.
I pulled out a thick, black-bound ledger. The edges were worn, the pages visibly yellowed with time.
"This is the first draft of *The Glass Orchard*, dated March 14, 2015," I said, holding it up for the camera. "Every word is handwritten in iron gall ink. Every entry is stamped and sealed by a public notary in White Plains. But more importantly..."
I opened the ledger to the inside cover.
"...on the first page of every single notebook I wrote over the last nine years, I had my husband sign an administrative receipt."
David Sterling’s jaw dropped. "Wait. He signed them?"
A collective gasp swept through the audience.
"Graham was an obsessive micromanager," I explained, my voice laced with dark amusement. "He insisted that every household expense, every delivery, every piece of courier mail be logged in an inventory binder so he could review the household costs every Sunday evening. I simply told him that these ledgers were the estate’s garden maintenance logs. For nine years, Graham signed his name at the bottom of every chapter, confirming that he had reviewed the document, had no interest in its contents, and recognized it as the exclusive personal property of Evelyn Pierce."
The studio erupted.
People were laughing, cheering, clapping their hands over their mouths in absolute disbelief.
"He signed your manuscripts as *garden logs*?" David Sterling yelled over the noise, shaking his head in hysterical awe.
"He never opened them," I said softly, looking directly into the center lens of Camera One. "He didn't care what was inside. To Graham, anything I touched was inherently trivial. He was so convinced that I was incapable of greatness that he literally authorized my masterpiece between checking the pool cleaning invoice and the landscaping bill."
Behind the studio glass, the monitor for Green Room C flashed.
Graham Alder had stood up. His face was pure, unadulterated ash. The leather binders he had brought to prove his 'genius' had slipped from his hands, the papers scattering across the carpet.
His junior lawyer was already backing away from him toward the door, holding his hands up, clearly resigning on the spot.
"And David," I added, waiting for the applause to die down to a sharp, breathless hush. "There is one more thing."
"Please," David whispered, leaning in. "By all means."
"Mr. Alder’s claim that he was the creative inspiration for the novel is particularly amusing," I said, tilting my head, "considering that the antagonist of *The Glass Orchard*—a charming, hollow financier who embezzles from his family trust to buy the affections of a young socialite—ends his story in chapter twenty-four."
"How does his story end, Evelyn?" David asked.
I smiled. A cold, blinding, triumphant smile.
"He gets arrested in a television studio," I said.
At that exact moment, the heavy fire doors at the back of the soundstage clicked open.
Four uniformed officers of the New York City Police Department, accompanied by two federal agents from the Securities and Exchange Commission, walked down the carpeted aisle toward the backstage holding area.
May you like
The live feed cut briefly to commercial, but the sound of Graham Alder’s frantic, desperate screams echoing through the backstage corridors could be heard all the way to the front row.
***
