Striking Out Your Stolen Name Chapter 2

The gala ended in chaos.

By midnight, my name sat at the absolute summit of every trending feed in the country.

#MeredithHayesAbuseOfPower

#JealousGuildPresident

#JusticeForNataliePrice

Sitting in my dark office at the Guild headquarters on 47th Street, the only sound was the rapid, rhythmic clatter of my mechanical keyboard.

I watched the venom pour across my screen.

“A bitter Appalachian nobody gets a desk job and suddenly thinks she can bully literary royalty.”

“Natalie’s grandmother is the legendary Beatrice Mercer! Genius is in their DNA. Meredith Hayes is just an illiterate bureaucrat.”

“I’ve read Echoes of the Brownstone—the prose made me weep. Hayes is a monster.”

The heavy oak door swung open without a knock. Frank Miller marched in, dumping a stack of morning editions onto my desk with a heavy slap.

"Look at this, Meredith! Just look at it!" Frank collapsed into the leather armchair, running both hands over his face. "The board is in full revolt. Two major endowment donors called my cell before dawn threatening to pull seven-figure grants."

He leaned forward, exasperated. "What the hell are you doing? I read the Price girl's manuscript myself. Her syntax, her structure—it’s head and shoulders above anything else in the debut category this year."

I closed my laptop screen halfway.

"Head and shoulders above everyone else? Even down to her punctuation errors being identical to an uncredited ghostwriter on an obscure fiction forum?"

Frank froze. "What are you talking about? Are you accusing her of plagiarism?"

"I’m investigating it," I said calmly. "And until that investigation is resolved, the Gold Medal does not leave this vault."

Frank let out a ragged breath, rubbing his temples. "Even if you have suspicions, you don't detonate the damn building on live television! You award the medal, you smile for the cameras, and we conduct a quiet inquiry behind closed doors. Now look at you—you’ve nailed yourself to the stake."

Before I could answer, Carrie, my personal assistant, knocked timidly and stepped into the room, her face pale.

"President Hayes... an envelope just arrived by courier from Beatrice Mercer’s foundation."

She placed a heavy, gilt-edged invitation on the blotter.

"Her assistant said Mr. Thomas Mercer is hosting a private literary salon at his townhouse tomorrow evening. They requested your presence specifically."

Frank’s eyes lit up with desperate hope. "There’s your lifeline. The old man is offering you a way out of the storm. You go, you apologize privately, you sign the certificate, and we release a statement claiming it was a procedural mix-up."

I picked up the heavy cream cardstock.

There was no title printed on it. It didn't say President Meredith Hayes. It simply read: Meredith Hayes.

To the Mercers, I was still the farm girl whose father wore steel-toed boots, an upstart niece who had forgotten her place.

I looked down at my hands and remembered my mother’s fingers during her final winter.

Those hands had produced prose so luminous that a state journal had called her a national treasure at seventeen. Yet, because of thirty years of husking corn in freezing barns, her knuckles had swollen into jagged knots, unable to even hold a pencil without weeping from the pain.

I remembered that sub-zero December in Ohio. We were burning scrap pine because we couldn't afford a truckload of coal. My mother had sat beside the drafty kitchen window, tracing an advertisement for Beatrice Mercer’s newest bestseller printed on a greasy newspaper wrapper.

"Meredith, look," she had whispered, her cracked voice shaking. "That sentence right there. I wrote that."

She had pointed to a pull-quote on the back page.

"I wrote that while watching the sunset over the river when I was sixteen. She didn't even change the adjectives."

I had asked her why we didn't hire a lawyer, why we didn't march onto their manicured lawns and demand justice.

She had stroked my hair with her rough, calloused palm, smiling sadly.

"They don't recognize justice, sweetheart. They only recognize bloodlines."

"Meredith? Are you listening to me?" Frank waved a hand in front of my face.

I blinked, returning to the dim office.

"I'm not going."

Frank bolted upright. "Don't be a fool! The board met an hour ago. If you can't produce ironclad proof by tomorrow afternoon, they are placing you on mandatory administrative leave! Are you really going to burn down your career for an unverified hunch?"

I picked up the gilded invitation, walked over to the corner, and fed it directly into the cross-cut shredder.

The machine whirred, spitting the embossed cream paper out as confetti.

"Not only am I not going," I said, looking Frank straight in the eye, "I want you to draft an emergency executive directive. As of this morning, all Guild recommendations, library distribution endorsements, and film rights certifications for Natalie Price’s Echoes of the Brownstone are frozen pending the outcome of my inquiry."

Frank stared at me as if I had lost my mind. "You're insane. You're declaring war on the Mercer dynasty." He grabbed his coat and stormed out, slamming the oak door so hard the glass pane rattled in its frame.

Thirty minutes later, my private cell phone vibrated.

An unfamiliar Manhattan area code.

I swiped to answer.

Donna’s voice purred through the receiver, thick with venomous triumph.

"Meredith? I hear the board is pushing you out the door as we speak." She let out a sharp, mocking laugh. "I told you last night—in this town, self-righteousness doesn't buy ink. You can't freeze anything. We closed an eight-figure adaptation deal with a major streaming studio an hour ago. Natalie isn't just winning; she’s going to use your ruined career as a stepping stone."

I opened a legal ledger on my screen, tapping my pen against the desk.

"Donna." My tone was polite, distant, and arctic. "Are you entirely certain that every single syllable in your daughter’s book belongs to her?"

There was a half-second pause on the line.

Then Donna’s voice spiked an octave higher. "Don't you dare play mind games with me! Natalie was mentored by Beatrice Mercer herself. Her brilliance is something a backwoods clerk like you couldn't comprehend in ten lifetimes! You spread one more lie about my child, and our attorneys will leave you without a roof over your head!"

I hung up without saying another word.

The desktop monitor chimed. A new message had landed in my encrypted inbox.

Sender: Anonymous.

Subject: Purchase Records and Original Outline for Echoes of the Brownstone.

I clicked the attachment. The progress bar began to crawl forward.