Daniel had played a dying man in four different productions over six years: a Victorian consumptive, a mobster, a king, and once, memorably, a computer scientist in a one-act that ran for nine performances off-off-Broadway. The directors all told him he was good at it, which meant something different each time. What they meant was that he didn't oversell it, that he made the audience feel the dying rather than watch the performance of dying. He had developed a way into the role that he did not discuss in interviews: he spent the first week of rehearsal doing ordinary things with the knowledge that this character was doing them for the last time. Eating breakfast. Walking to the subway. Reading the news. It gave his performance an attention to ordinary moments that the directors called authentic and that Daniel knew was something closer to grief rehearsal. The problem arrived between productions, in the gaps when he was not playing anyone dying. He found himself unable to entirely stop the exercise. He ate breakfast. He noted it. He walked to the subway and the walk had a weight it had not had before he started acting. His therapist said this was occupational bleed and that it would pass. It passed and then it came back with the next role and he decided, sometime around the fourth production, that he did not entirely want it to stop.

The novel had forty-seven drafts saved in a folder called NOVEL_FINAL with a number appended. NOVEL_FINAL_47 was the most recent. Claire had spent nine years producing these drafts and she was not sure she was closer than she had been at NOVEL_FINAL_12, which was around the time she had last believed she was making progress. She opened NOVEL_FINAL_1, which she had not read in eight years. It was rougher than she remembered and also more alive than NOVEL_FINAL_47 in a way she could not precisely name. The sentences were worse. The structure was wrong. The main character made a decision in chapter two that Claire had removed from all subsequent drafts because it was impulsive and did not seem to belong to the person she was trying to write. Reading it now, the decision seemed entirely true. She did not immediately rewrite the novel. She went for a walk and thought about what it meant that the most honest version of a thing was the first attempt, before she had learned enough to improve it. She came back and opened NOVEL_FINAL_48 and restored the chapter two decision. She did not know if this was progress. She numbered it forty-eight anyway.