The Missing Chapter

I found it because I was two months early with the paperwork, which is the only useful thing I have ever got out of being the way I am.

The third week of January. We were on page two hundred and fifty-eight and we had been on page two hundred and fifty-eight, in one form or another, for most of two days, because the middle chapters of that novel are where Giulia stopped being funny in a way she never entirely recovered from. Twenty-seven pages in a fortnight. In November we had done that in four days.

So on the Tuesday evening, while Elodie was down at the university doing the two hours a week they pay her for, I sat in the study with the lamps on and began assembling the delivery package, because a manuscript does not arrive at a publisher as a pile of paper and a…