If he were to avoid drawing Bibi Blair’s attention in the years ahead, as he became an increasingly prominent person, he could not, of course, call himself Robert Faulkner or Birk Terezin. He needed a simple but solid name, a name of substance; and one had occurred to him earlier. Quite a lot of time would pass before he would realize that this name had been a literary allusion that Bibi made in her first novel, which she had imagined him reading after she had come to his attention in that other world of her invention. He introduced himself to Beth, but it was not then, at that early stage when he might have avoided the error, that he discovered the trap into which he had stepped. Beth was not a bookish person, and as her elevated social circle was not very bookish, either, the former Birk Terezin established his new identity with impeccable forged papers.
A few years later, he was fast on the rise with that new name before he discovered it was also the name of a sociopathic murderer in five novels by Patricia Highsmith: Thomas Ripley. By then his picture had been in many admiring newspaper articles, his name in headlines, and he could only suppose that she had become aware of him, had recognized him even with his new look, as she might not have done if he had been named Bob Smith. He could not decide how worried he should be until that same night he woke in terror from a dream involving assassins. After leaving bed and hurrying to his home office, he searched the Internet for a photograph of Bibi Blair’s husband, who had been a Navy SEAL. Ripley could not help but be alarmed to discover that the spouse of such a famous author seemed never to have been photographed. Paxton Thorpe’s photo was also missing from the public archives of former SEALs. And what of the men with whom he had served, all of them special ops veterans? What did they look like?
Without quite knowing how he’d gotten there, Thomas Ripley found himself at a window, peering out at Newport Harbor, at his private dock, past his impressive yacht, to where reflections of the moon trembled on black water. Only the moonlight, rippling. Nothing else. All seemed as it should be. As it would until…He stood there waiting in a torment of imagination.