(New York, Winter 1986) Snow drifted across the windowpanes like muffled music.
In a small apartment on Astor Place, Leonard sat on the floor, surrounded by piles of manuscripts, books, and handwritten notes.
He was only thirty-five, but he looked as if his voice had been ripped from him.
He had a single sheet of paper in front of him.
It wasn't from a book he'd written, but from a text sent to him by an obscure student.
The text was astonishing.
Pure, strange, refusing flattery, and containing something like a distilled truth. Something Leonard had never written.
He read the line a third time:
"...and because a word needs no killer, only an oblivious person to die."
He leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes.
At that moment, the first cracks in his conscience began.
There were days when he couldn't write.
The text haunted him—not because it was better than him, but because it came from a soul that still believed in something.
Something he had lost long ago.
At a meeting of the publishing committee of the literary magazine where he worked, Leonard held up a piece of paper. He told the audience:
“We have a new text… It doesn’t have a name, but it will be the beginning of a new era.”
He didn’t mention the author’s name.
He didn’t ask for permission.
Instead of holding it up, he sucked it up.
He rewrote the title.
He changed the sentences a little.
And when the text was published, his name was underneath it: Leonard Graves.
That night, when he returned to his apartment, he found a small piece of paper on the door.
Unsigned.
Just three words:
“We’ve all read you.”
He burned the paper.
But he didn’t forget the words.
From that moment on, a long series of cover-ups, escapes, and pretenses began.
He didn’t notice that someone had begun writing the story of his own death the day he stole the text.
On the last page of his notebook, he wrote something that no one read:
"I didn't kill anyone... but I stole his pulse."
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