Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to substance misuse and violence.

A woman wakes up in a hospital, and a man asks if she is Madame Wilcox. A doctor appears and tells her that she was in a car accident. The doctor gives the woman hydrocodone for the pain. He tells her to rest and the woman repeats the name “Helen” as she falls asleep.

Florence Darrow and her friend Lucy arrive at a holiday publishing party in New York City. Florence is an editorial assistant at Forrester Books. Florence overhears a junior editor named Amanda Lincoln calling a man a misogynist for thinking that Maud Dixon is a man. Maud Dixon is the pseudonym of the author of a debut novel called Mississippi Foxtrot that came out several years earlier. The novel follows two teenage girls named Ruby and Maud, who leave their hometown in Mississippi to escape their past. The novel culminates in Maud killing a man who pursues Ruby, who is only 16 years old. Despite the popularity of the novel in literary circles, Maud Dixon has never revealed her identity, or whether the novel contains references to true events.