Chapter 13 · free to read
The novel describes eleven streets in this city. Everything else is here — solid, loud, full of people, and completely absent from the manuscript.
Every fact I own is about that lit set down there. Chapter thirty-one, the port deal. Chapter thirty-six, the illness. Twenty-two, the wedding. None of it happens here. Here I am a woman with a notebook full of somebody else's weather.
Cleaners, drivers, kitchen, security night shift, plant maintenance. Two hundred and forty people who keep the described world running and appear in the manuscript as the words 'the staff', twice.
She can request an edit on anything that has an entry. Minju had four words and lost them in eleven seconds. These two hundred and forty-one have no entry at all — and you cannot delete a line that was never written.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.