He was never a ghost story. He was a man. And someone finally listened. London, October 2000. Meg Harlow has loved the story of the Opera Ghost since she was thirteen years old-long before she landed the role of Meg Giry in the West End production that made his legend immortal. She was born in Rouen, like the man in Leroux's novel. She knows the show so well the lines feel less like something she learned and more like something she remembered. And she has noticed what no one else in the company will say out loud: Box Five is always empty. Then, alone on the stage under the ghost light, Meg feels a presence. And when she puts pen to paper, the pen moves on its own. What begins as a single impossible message becomes a correspondence unlike any other-between a young performer at the height of her first great role and Erik, the man behind the mask, still lingering more than a century after the world decided he was a monster. Through their sessions, Erik tells the story no libretto ever could: Persia and the daroga, the cellars of the Palais Garnier, the night in 1896 when everything fell, and the woman whose leaving he never survived. But Meg's gift comes with a cost, and Erik's confession carries a weight that spans two cities and a hundred years. As their sessions deepen-from His Majesty's Theatre to the catacomb-dark corridors beneath the Paris Opera-Meg realizes she may be the only person who can offer Erik the one thing he was denied in life: to be truly known. And perhaps, at last, released. An original novel inspired by Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, The Man Behind the Mask is a haunting story of music, grief, and the unfinished business of love-for anyone who ever sat in the dark, heard a voice from everywhere and nowhere, and wondered what became of the man it belonged to.