Struggling novelist Elias Vane has one decade of rejections and nothing to show for it—until he finds an alley that shouldn’t exist and a building waiting at the end of it: Blackwood Publishing House.Inside, a manuscript bears his name. It knows about the seventeen nights he sat at a window at age nine, waiting for a father who never came back — marked one by one with a coin on a windowsill his mother later painted over. Then it predicts, to the exact minute (9:17 PM), that footsteps will sound above him in a building he has confirmed is empty. They do.Elias isn’t just reading his story. Someone is still writing it.As he digs deeper, he crosses paths with Mara Quinn, a journalist hunting the same building for a darker reason: her sister disappeared after finding it first. Together, they uncover the impossible truth—Blackwood doesn’t preserve stories. It authors them, deciding in real time who lives, who vanishes, and how every ending is written.Now Elias has to find out who’s holding the pen before his own story reaches its final page.