are, you can see them.’ So tomorrow rolled around, I went for a long swim in the ocean, and she was sitting at the bar when we opened. I set the mountain of pads in front of her, and she sat and read and sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes until two the next morning.
“When she closed the last pad, she took off her glasses, wiped her eyes, and stared at me. She said, ‘You know who I am?’ I shook my head. Had no idea. She placed one hand on the mound of paper. ‘Will you let me publish this?’
“That struck me as strange. ‘Why?’ I asked.
“She stamped out a cigarette. ‘Because I’ve been publishing books for thirty-eight years, and I have yet to come across one that will heal broken hearts like this.’
“I poured myself some club soda and sipped. ‘You really believe that?’
“She nodded once. ‘I do.’
“So we talked an hour while she tried to convince me. I took her number. She said she’d be down here a week. I could call anytime. Before she flew out, she swung by the bar. I was sitting there writing. I handed her a plastic grocery bag stuffed with all my notebooks. I raised a finger. ‘Nobody but you ever knows me. We don’t use my real name, don’t put my face on the cover, and I’m never doing a single interview. I am a ghost.’
“She smiled. ‘Even better.’”
I tried not to look at Summer, whose jaw was hanging down in the water.
“So we concocted this plan to let my character continue to write his own stories. This weird twist on autobiographical fiction. Like if Indiana Jones had written his own books and published them under his own name. We used my name. David Bishop.” I shrugged. “My real name is David Bishop Murphy. ‘Murph’ or ‘Murphy’ was my nickname. ‘Shepherd’ we added. Or rather, Bones did.
“The publisher took my bag back to New York and broke those sixty-eight pads into four stories, which she published systematically every six months. By the time the second installment was slated to release, people were champing at the bit and news organizations had hired private investigators to determine my identity. The book stayed at number one for weeks before it ever hit the shelf. Numbers three and four set publishing records I knew nothing about. Seems women readers had a thing for a guy like David Bishop. So while I tended bar for tips, I made more money than I could spend in ten lifetimes.
“I called Colorado and told him I wanted to go back to work but I wanted to do it a little differently. I wanted to create a place where we could help folks once we found them—help them walk the road from broken to not. So we did. I bought a ghost town. A literal town that had been abandoned when the silver ran out, and we brought it back to life. Now we have a school, a hospital, all-female sports teams, and really good security. It’s a community of people all wrapping their arms around girls who thought they’d never hear the sound of their own laughter again. Whose lives have been a thousand times worse than anything I can imagine. We’ve built condos. Homes. If they don’t want to go to school, we train them in a skill or trade. We also partner, silently, with Fortune 500 companies, since many of them are run by the moms and dads of the children we’ve found. They ski on the weekends. Raft and mountain bike in the summer.
“Colorado, or Bones, runs our little secret town, while I find people who need finding.” I shrugged. “And at night, to remind myself that I once knew love, I write. Or at least I did.”
Summer whispered, “What do you mean?”
I pointed to Gone Fiction. At Fingers’ orange box. “I wrote the final installment, due out in a couple weeks.” I shook my head. “Thanks to readers like you, it, too, sits at number one. Has for over a month. In the story, Fingers dies. As does Marie. Writing just hurts too much. I had to kill them and the series because writing the life of David Bishop was killing me. So before I started out on this trip, I took all fourteen novels, burned them, collected their ashes in that orange box, and strapped it to my boat so that when I got here—to the end of the world—I could spread those words