Chapter Nineteen

A fifty-year-old writer who uses a wheelchair finally writes the thriller he always meant to, with an AI's help. At his first signing, a stranger leaves him an annotated copy with a note in the margin of chapter nineteen: *He's alive. Who told you?* The quiet life the writer invented for his fictional informant turns out to match a real man in hiding, and a patient crime boss named Kane wants to know how. With Cassie and Detective Reed, the writer survives what his book set loose. Kane ends up behind glass, and the writer closes the AI and never writes chapter twenty.