“So, what if . . .” I say, “he’s the caretaker of the garden. The horticulturist. And she’s the caretaker of the lady in the wheelchair. Who wants to be brought to the Cloisters each week. They see each other a dozen times. I’m talking lingering glances, a couple of ‘excuse me’s.’ Each is forming opinions—all wrong!—about who the other is. And then one day . . .” I trail off, thinking. “What happens? Who would break the ice? Maybe it’s the old lady. She wants to live to see her granddaughter find love, so she slips the gardener the girl’s number?”

  “I like it,” Noah says, no trace of sarcasm in his voice.

  “It could work, right?” My heart and confidence soar.

  “Maybe you should write it,” Noah says, crouching to study a medieval aloe plant. “Or offer it to another writer you work with?”

  And . . . heart and confidence now plummeting down to the core of the earth. Invitation to Italy spontaneously combusting. “Why not you?”

  Noah circles the fountain, arms crossed over his chest. “I’m not trying to make this harder. But recently, I’m finding myself less interested in the meet-cute as an engine.”

  Two weeks ago, I would have found this comment obnoxious, dismissive of the books I love and he claims to love, too. I would have fought back: The meet-cute is everything! All good love stories need one.

  But today is not about me. It’s about helping Noah get inspired.

  “And you’re finding yourself more interested in . . .” I offer.

  He looks at me. His green eyes flash. “The full rhapsodic spectacle of life.”

  Well, he was ready for me there.

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “Yeah, that can be romantic, too.”

  He tips his head for me to follow him, and we walk out of the garden, toward an elevated stone walkway that overlooks the Hudson River. It’s a gorgeous day, a spectacular view. I resist the urge to tell him this is one of the highest points in all of Manhattan.

  “My mom is sick,” Noah says, leaning his elbows on the railing by the river. “She has Alzheimer’s. And recently, she’s taken a turn.”

  I stand near him, feeling crushed on his behalf. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not telling you to make excuses. I only want to explain. My mom is the reason I started writing.”

  “Really?” I’ve always wondered about the Noa Callaway origin story. Everyone at Peony has.

  “Her first name is Calla,” he says. “I wrote Ninety-Nine Things because of her. She likes love stories. She used to, anyway.” He rubs his jaw, and gazes out across the water. Sorrow shimmers from him. I recognize it well.

  I know the best that I can do is listen.

  “If this book is the last book I write that she gets to read,” he says, “I want it to speak to the scope of love, not just to its beginning.”

  “The epic of a heart,” I say, as my skin pricks with goose bumps. It’s not bad. It’s very good.

  He nods. “I don’t know who the characters are, or what the circumstances would be. . . .”

  For a few moments we say nothing, but it doesn’t feel like one of those silences you look for ways to fill. It feels like we are letting this quiet upper reach of Manhattan take our hard conversation in its gentle hands.

  “Tell me about your mom,” I say. “You said you were raised by a house full of women?”

  “After my dad left,” he says, “Mom and I lived with two other ladies from her nursing school. Aunt Terry and Aunt B.”

  “Back up. Aunt . . . Terry?”

  Noah smiles, enjoying my surprise. “We were this crazy, estrogen-rich, romance-loving household. My mom and my aunts’ favorite thing to do was swap novels and argue over plots and characters. It was like a book club that never ended.”

  “And eventually,” I say, “you got inducted?”

  “I read Clan of the Cave Bear in first grade.”

  “Those books are so underrated!” I say. “Jondalar was my first fictional crush.”

  “Oh, is that your type?” he jokes and I turn red, thinking back on those notoriously steamy cave scenes that I read at least three thousand times.

  “So when you started writing . . .” I say, putting a corner piece of the Noa Callaway puzzle into place.

  He nods. “I’d fallen in love with love. Though, obviously, at twenty, I didn’t know a thing about it.”

  I picture Noah at twenty, not knowing a thing about love. It’s sort of cute.

  “When I showed the first draft of Ninety-Nine Things to my mom,” he says, “she didn’t believe I’d written it. If my own mother couldn’t see it, what reader would want to open the back flap and see me?”

  I consider what his author photo might look like. Smoldering green eyes flirting with the camera. Dark curls just long enough to suggest untamed. Black turtleneck. No, a button-down showing a little bit of chest hair . . .

  He’s right. His author photo would give his readers a shock.

  “Alix didn’t know I was a man until after she’d bought the manuscript,” he continues, another key piece falling into place. “We had no idea Ninety-Nine Things would take off the way it did. I never thought I’d make a career of it. Once upon a time . . .”

  “It was just a love story?”

  “Yes,” he says, meeting my eyes. It feels as if this is the first time we’ve ever really looked at each other. “It was just a love story.”

  We keep walking along the river, the sun high and bright overhead, the view of the George Washington Bridge growing in the distance.

  “It’s your move,” he says, catching me off guard.

  “What?”

  “In chess.” He waves his phone. “It’s been your turn for over a week. You’re about to forfeit the game.”

  “Oh! I’ve been—”

  “Paralyzed by my impending victory?”

  “More like trying not to distract you with push notifications! Also, I don’t want to completely crush your confidence in this delicate creative moment. You’ve lost—what?—the past six games in a row?”

  “That’s only because I can’t use my intimidation tactics over the app.”

  “And those would be?”

  Noah squares off to face me, crosses his arms, and raises one eyebrow dramatically with an exaggerated tilt of his head. All he needs is a monocle to complete the look of total lunatic. I burst out laughing.

  “I’m scared now,” I say.

  “See?”

  “Scared for you that you think that’s an intimidation tactic. You look like an Angry Bird.”

  “Fine, but I am a better chess player in person. The game of kings needs human beings.”

  “Well, if only you hadn’t pissed me off so much that day in Central Park,” I say, feigning a sigh. “We could have already put this argument to rest.”

  “I’m afraid there’s only one solution,” he says.

  “Are you challenging me to a game of chess?” I say, feeling my competitive spirit rise.

  He nods. “And hoping you like sushi, because I’m starving, and Saturdays are for sushi.” Then he does the thing with the eyebrow again until I crack up and agree.

  * * *

  Noah tells the cab to stop at Ninety-Fifth and Broadway.

  “What are we doing here?” I ask as he opens the door.

  “This is where I live.” He leads us toward a black iron gate tucked into the center of a two-story Tudor-style apartment building. The place looks out of time, dwarfed by taller and more modern buildings on all sides.

  I’ve been here before, I realize. This is the entrance to Pomander Walk, the pedestrian enclave of row houses Meg brought me to once for a party. It had been on my list of Fifty Ways to Break Up Noah and His Writer’s Block. He crossed it out.

  “You don’t live here,” I say as Noah takes out a key and unlocks the gate. He leads me up a set of brick stairs, which open to a private garden the length of an avenue block. “You live in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park.”

  “I write in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park,” he says. “I live in a studio, right there.” He points to a quaint brick façade halfway down the walk, with the sweetest little apple tree out front. “It’s tiny, and I rent, but”—he looks around at the garden, as if it’s still a wonderful surprise to him—“I’ll never give it up.”

  Which explains why he was walking around the Upper West Side with his bunny while I was at Emergency Brunch.

  Recalibrate, Lanie, I tell myself.

  I was expecting a doorman, an elevator, expensive steel and glass. I was expecting to be annoyed by my envy of his wealth, which I assumed he spent in flashy, impersonal ways. But now . . . something about entering Noah’s garden-level studio apartment is disorienting. It’s so intimate. Maybe too intimate.

  He’s unlocking his door. I need to decide whether to call this off right now.

  “There’s the sushi,” he says, glancing behind us at a figure bearing take-out bags, waiting at the garden gate. “I’ll get it. Go on in. Just close the door behind you so Javier Bardem doesn’t get out?”

  “Sure,” I say, accidentally deciding not to call it off. I step inside Noah’s apartment and close the door. “What is happening?” I whisper as I attempt to acclimate to my surroundings.

  It must be said: It’s a beautiful studio apartment. Polished wood floors, a working fireplace, low ceilings but lots of natural light. The furniture is elegant mid-century, the kitchen tiny but well appointed.

  It’s very nice, but it’s not so much nicer than my own apartment. I have more square footage, and an actual wall between my bed and the front door—so where does he get off demanding that we never meet at my place again?

  But then, I think about our day today—how nice it’s been, our rapport so different than it was at my apartment. There is a chance that I misread something about Noah’s attitude that day.

  I tour his apartment cautiously. There are certainly more plants than I expected—succulents and baby palms, orchids and bamboo, all of them thriving and green. There’s framed art on nearly every inch of wall space—including a masterful Kehinde Wiley that I recognize from his Ferguson series. There’s a surfboard in the corner, a metal trashcan with pictures of all the presidents up to Reagan, which tells me Noah’s probably had this since he was a little boy. There’s a beer-making kit on the windowsill that looks like he took it out of the box but never actually brewed anything. There’s a stack of old Playbills under a lamp—the one on top is from Oh, Hello, the Broadway show Rufus and I laughed our asses off at a few years ago on his birthday. There’s no bookshelf that I can see, only a short stack of poetry books on the coffee table. Lucille Clifton, Paul Celan, Heather Christle. I approve.

  I open the Christle and sink onto a leather couch just as Noah comes in with the sushi. Javier Bardem hops in from out of nowhere and Noah scoops him up.

  “I thought I’d find you by the books,” he says, turning to me. “Is this okay? Are you comfortable?” His expression suggests that I am very uncomfortable.

  “Sure,” I say, holding up the Christle book. “She’s really good.”

  “I have her other collections at my office,” he says, moving into the kitchen where I hear the rustle of unpacking sushi. “Most of my books are there.”

  “It’s funny,” I say, “I just found out my grandfather wrote poetry.”

  He looks at me through the galley window of the kitchen, eyebrows raised. And so I find myself telling Noah Ross about Drenthe, and the war, and how BD had FedExed me a giant Ziploc bag of poetry this week. I tell him how, reading it, I’d felt a new kinship with my grandfather; I wasn’t the only weirdo in my family of doctors to ever care about words on a page. Saying all this aloud feels meaningful, and I’m glad to have Noah here to listen.

  “If you hadn’t sent me those tulips,” I say, “I wouldn’t have understood that my mother planted tulips for her father. I wouldn’t have looked this closely to find the reason I’ve always loved the simple way they bloom. Because of her. Because of him.”

  “I think what you’re talking about is the second draft effect,” Noah calls from the kitchen.

  I rise from the couch and go to the kitchen, where I find him plating sushi like a chef. “Explain.”

  “You know how the second draft is the point where things start to make sense?” he says, taking out real chopsticks from a drawer, tossing aside the disposable ones. “It’s why I blaze through my first drafts so quickly—to get there.”

  I know what Noah means. Back in the garden with my mother, that was the first draft. Exploring the cool, damp soil between my toes. The curving yellow stripes of a caterpillar wriggling across a leaf. The weight of my mother’s hands over mine as she showed me how to pack the bulbs into the earth. The sunny sound of her voice when we sang Lucinda Williams songs together, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” The pleasure of being with her overwhelmed my power to know what it all meant.

  Time and space and losing her, emails with Noah, talks with BD, and the Ziploc bag of poems have given things a new perspective. I can shine a light on the meaning that was always there. It feels like getting a little more of my mother and my grandfather than I’d had before.

  “Can I help?” I ask.

  It’s too late to help, and this is not accidental. Meg would have called me out—Classic Lanie! But Noah has done a far better job setting up this feast than I could have. There are little dishes for soy sauce and ponzu and ginger, ceramic chopstick holders. He’s even transferred the miso soup to actual bowls. It looks elegant and delicious.

  “I think we’re ready,” he says, carrying the sushi to a marble table by the fireplace. I find myself watching the way he walks, blushing when he looks back and catches me.

  There’s a carrot roll for Javier Bardem to enjoy at his own small table. For several moments, I fall into the cute vortex of watching a bunny eat sushi.

  “I need to expand Alice’s palate,” I say, thinking of the iceberg lettuce she had for breakfast.

  “Chessboard’s by the window if you want to set it up,” Noah says, heading back into the kitchen. “I can make green tea,” he calls, “or open a bottle of sake?”

  “Sake,” I say, finding the board and moving it to the table. “We’re celebrating.”

  “What are we celebrating?” he asks from the kitchen. I hear the smile in his voice.

  “Future epics of the heart. Saying fuck it to the meet-cute. And also . . . surviving a day together.”

  “We still have time to ruin it,” Noah says, returning with a chilled bottle of sake.

  “Your choice of outing is up next, you know,” I say as he pours sake into crystal cordial glasses. “But don’t worry, no one expects it to compete with today.”

  He raises his glass to mine. “I’m not worried. My excursion is pure gold.”

  “You have one picked out?” I assumed I’d have to harass him into making any sort of plan.

  “I’m in the final scheduling phase right now.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see,” he says as we sit down.

  We dive into fresh sashimi, spicy tuna on crispy rice cakes, divine crab handrolls, and halibut carpaccio in spicy yuzu jelly that pairs perfectly with the sake.

  “You do takeout really well,” I say, sipping my miso soup.

  “You should see what I do in restaurants.”

  I laugh. “Where does one even get all these little bowls? And the chopsticks—are they made of jade?”

  Noah smiles, watching me mishandle them to seize a slice of halibut. “They’re from a shop called Bo’s. Whenever I go there, I find something special, something I’ve never seen before. It’s not far from Peony. You should check it out. He has chopsticks in pink quartz, too.”

  “I will.” I don’t want to let Noah know that most of my sushi eating at home happens on my couch, glued to BBC America, using my hands to drag a spicy tuna roll through the soy sauce I’ve squirted into the lid of the plastic container.

  He points at the chessboard between us. “Guests go first.”

  I steel myself, intent not to laugh when he debuts that freakish eyebrow tic. But to my surprise, Noah has shifted into serious game mode and clearly isn’t messing around.

  I move my pawn into the center quadrant. I watch him do the same.

  Though we have never sat across the chessboard from each other quite like this, there is not the curious tension of playing the game for the first time with someone new. We’re used to moving these pieces around each other.

  We’re not used to knowing where our real hands go in real life between real turns. Twice our fingers graze at the edges of the board.

  I remember our first handshake. How it sent a bolt of lightning through me. His touch now, even accidental, still does the same.

  I tell myself to pay closer attention to his hands so as to avoid grazing them, but that backfires, because then I pay too close attention to them and lose my knight. I’ve never noticed how strong they are.

  Lanie. Remember your career on the line? The precarious balance you are in with this man? Stop gazing at his meet-cuticles. Win the game and go home.

  I swig another glass of sake, because something needs to take the edge off. Because, is it just me or is it getting a little too Thomas Crown Affair in here?

  I focus on my tactical approach. Noah’s strategy is different IRL than it is online. He castles on his left and brings his queen out daringly early. I find this style familiar, though, and after half a dozen turns, I realize Noah plays chess like the character he wrote in the chess scenes of his novel, Twenty-One Games with a Stranger.