Jane Actually

the closing doors. Then he had to dodge and weave until he could find an unoccupied chair in the hallway and sat, hoping he could puzzle out the mystery.
    Perhaps my Jane is a friend of this woman,
he thought, but without conviction. It seemed unlikely that his Jane would know
the
Jane’s agent.
    Try as he might, he could find no reason why the woman might send an email to his Jane, except one. Albert had learned the lesson of Occam’s razor during his time in the trenches, which many of the generals never had. He knew that the simplest explanation of a thing was probably the best, and in this case, the simplest explanation for why the friend and agent of Jane Austen would be forwarding an email to his Jane was …
    Still he shied away from voicing the thought. If it were true, then it would mean that his Jane had lied to him.
    But he just as quickly shied away from that thought as well. Jane has never claimed to be … Jane.
Not once has she ever
… Then he thought of her AfterNet profile, which mirrored the biography of the Jane Austen.
    Of course he hadn’t believed the profile when he first saw it, no more than he believed the profiles of the many Napoleon Bonapartes and Winston Churchills and Lord Nelsons and Genghis Khans he’d heard of or met. Most were either clearly insane or poseurs, but a few were quite rational and enjoyable companions. He had just assumed some people wanted a more compelling biography for their afterlife. Even he had amended the details of his death, preferring to tell Jane he died on the battlefield rather than the dull reality of dying of influenza on a hospital cot.
    So I can’t say that Jane has ever directly lied to me …
    But that thought brought back all the doubts he’d experienced the past several months and his suspicion that Jane had been less than truthful.
    What a complete and utter prat I’ve been! She’s been lying to me about everything. All that stuff and nonsense about her job. She just didn’t want to talk to me anymore.
    He thought of all the missed chats and her fictions about arguments with co-workers and her humorous anecdotes.
Was any of that true! What was I to her?
    He got up from the chair, full of a rage that his incorporeal status could not dissipate. In his knockabout days he would have been spoiling for a fight, or a drink, or a drink and a fight. But in his disembodied state, his only release was movement and so he fought the crowd and went outside and wrapped in his own anger and misery, stalked the streets of downtown Fort Worth.

The Seinfeld of literature
Jane savours her victory
    J ane and Mary returned to their suite only five minutes before the BBC crew was to arrive. Melody was already waiting for them but gave them the good news the film crew was running late and they had another fifteen minutes. They quickly prepared Mary, changing her out of her semi-disguise that she used to move throughout the hotel and into her costume.
    Jane wasn’t needed for this part, of course, and instead took the time to savour her victory. Although she’d professed a philosophic attitude toward the outcome, she was still pleased to have put the odious Courtney Blake in his place. She was less happy to find herself at odds with Dr Davis.
    She was also upset that her victory was accomplished by confirming the existence of the letter. The high-minded paragraph she had recited gave no idea how much bile and vitriol she had put into it.
    And now everyone may see it at the British Library, where it will join my desk.
1
Ah well, who visits a library these days?
    All things considered, she decided to consider the day a success and her one desire was to share that success with Albert. Watching Mary and Stephen untangle their relationship because of his very understandable failure to inform her of something that would put him in a bad light made it obvious that she should confess all to Albert.
    Her behaviour, however, was far less honourable than Stephen’s.
I have actively dissembled … no, call it what it is … I have actively lied to him.
    She had planned to confess after the AGM, but now she realized, in being unable to share her success with Albert, the consequences of her deception. She determined then that she must tell him the truth. She searched for him online but he was nowhere to be found.
    It is my own fault. I have heartlessly neglected him since arriving.
She wallowed in these thoughts for a time before the possibility that he might have left the