"That doesn't describe the work," she said.
His lawyer referred to market expectations, existing publicity, and the complexity of renegotiating agreements. Rosa asked whether complexity changed the contribution record. It did not. Adrian spoke directly then. He had spent years making the book publishable. He had negotiated revisions while Nia was unavailable for stretches. He had dealt with editors, rejection, and uncertainty. Nia agreed those tasks mattered. She asked why he had answered her last request for news by saying the project was still nowhere. He stared at the table. No explanation about literary labor could answer a question about a message he knowingly sent.
"I thought you would want to take it back," he said finally.
The room became very quiet. Nia asked what back meant. Adrian rubbed his eyes. He had feared being reduced to a reviser, treated as the person who polished work she created. He wanted to be recognized as a translator in his own right. "So you prevented the thing you feared by doing it to me," she said. The sentence surprised her with its simplicity. He did not deny it. His lawyer requested a break. Nia agreed and went into the corridor, where she stood beside a framed photograph of an empty beach until her breathing steadied. Understanding his fear did not make the choice less deliberate.
They returned to practical questions. The published attribution needed to reflect both actual contributions and the parties' agreements, subject to proper review. Existing copies could be corrected through appropriate measures. Future editions and digital materials could change. Payment could address work and losses without substituting for credit. No settlement would require Nia to certify that sole attribution had been accurate. Rosa proposed options for discussion. Adrian's lawyer said they would consider them. The meeting ended without agreement. Nia walked home rather than calling a car. For several blocks, she felt nothing. Then she began shaking so badly she sat outside a closed florist and called Dani.
Dani stayed on the phone until she reached a familiar bus stop. "Did he apologize?" she asked. Nia said he had described fear, work, and exhaustion, but not yet named the lie without qualification. Dani was silent. Then she asked what Nia needed that evening. "No book," Nia said. "No questions about being brave." They watched an absurd cooking competition and argued about a contestant's attempt to make dessert inside a teapot. The distraction did not trivialize the dispute. It returned Nia to a world where a bad decision could end with ruined custard rather than a missing name. She needed that scale of consequence for a while.
At midnight, Lin sent a short message through Fang. She had read the comparison summary and wanted Nia involved in reviewing a passage the English edition treated differently from the source. It concerned a character named Aunt Wen, whose relationship to the protagonist's mother had become less explicit. Nia remembered the scene. Her draft preserved the ambiguity of social speech while making the intimacy clear. Adrian's revision had turned it into a conventional friendship. She opened both versions and felt the anger return, this time attached to a precise question. Had the change come from Adrian, an editor, or the author herself? Lin's message ended with a request to discuss it privately before anyone assumed the answer.
Chapter 8
The Passage About Aunt Wen
Lin met Nia in a small hotel sitting room with Fang and Marcus present. Helen joined by telephone. The author had the Mandarin novel open beside Nia's original draft and Adrian's later version. She asked Nia to explain what the relationship meant in her translation. Nia described the repeated domestic details, the shared bed implied by an object in the room, and the daughter's refusal to name what she understood. It was not an accidental ambiguity. English could preserve social uncertainty without erasing the relationship. Lin listened, then admitted she had approved the softened version after Fang expressed concern about publicity in several markets. Adrian had proposed it. The decision had been hers too.
Nia looked at Fang. She had been managing her mother's international career for years, absorbing threats, practical complications, and questions Lin preferred not to answer. She worried that public discussion would reduce a complex novel to a biographical controversy. "People treat fiction as a witness statement when it suits them," Fang said. Nia understood the fear. She also understood that readers received a different book when a relationship disappeared under the banner of protecting complexity. Helen asked whether the revision was an authorized adaptation or presented as translation. Fang said translation. That word now required them to examine what had changed and why.