The next time these doors open, we’ll be on Roosevelt Island. After that we’ll be all the way in Queens. I look at Noah. A silent verdict passes between us. We bolt off the train just before the doors slam shut, and land in the station at Sixty-Third and Lex, where we double over, laughing.

  “I cannot believe I did that!” I say, trying to catch my breath. “It’s your fault for distracting me with your terrible impression.”

  “I think it’s a sign,” Noah says. “I think you were meant to take a sunset stroll with me through Central Park tonight.”

  I meet his eyes, not laughing anymore. His smile quickens my pulse.

  “But you said you didn’t want to get a drink with Bernadette. I thought . . . Don’t you have plans?”

  “I didn’t want to get a drink with Bernadette,” he says, still looking at me. “But I’d love to take a walk with you.”

  We stare at each other for a supercharged few seconds, and that’s when I feel it. It’s not just attraction I have for Noah. There’s something between us. He feels it, too.

  I should not go for a walk with him right now. I should go home and . . . is cold showering really a thing that people do?

  But what if this walk becomes the moment that inspiration strikes? What if I pass on the chance to be there, because I was worried I was starting to think about Noah in subway-fantasy-material ways?

  “Can I show you my favorite place in New York?” I say, pretending la-di-da, that no part of me wants to jump his bones.

  “Is it the Austrian Cultural Forum?” he asks, then ducks before I can smack him.

  I lead him to the Gapstow Bridge. It’s cold but not windy, a rare evening where I’m wearing the exact right amount of layers. It’s dusk. The light is glowy pink and enchanting. I’ve walked this path hundreds of times, but it’s never looked as pretty to me as it does tonight. We pause at the center of the bridge and gaze across the pond.

  “This is your spot?” he says.

  “I started coming here when I was twenty-two, before I got the job at Peony. I’d stop here and look out at the city, and entertain my wildest dreams.”

  “And when you stand here now,” he says, “what do you dream of?”

  “You getting a book idea,” I say, half joking.

  “Is that—” Noah says, leaning forward, his hand shielding his eyes from the last of the sun. I follow his gaze, and I see them. The couple walking toward the pond. They’re bundled up. They’re holding hands. They have their picnic basket and travel table in tow.

  “Edward and Elizabeth,” I whisper.

  He turns to me, wide-eyed. “You know them?”

  “After a fashion,” I say, and then—

  “They do this every week.” We say the words at the same time. We stare at each other, astonishment in our eyes.

  “I’ve been watching them for years!” I say.

  “Me, too.” Noah sounds bewildered. “They’ve probably had two thousand picnics in Central Park.”

  We turn our attention to the couple. They’ve set up their picnic, put the lantern on the table. They’re holding hands, just talking, as they always do before they eat.

  “This is the book,” Noah whispers.

  I’m so hung up on the coincidence that it takes me a moment to register his words.

  “The book,” I finally say. “Wait. This is the book? They are the book?”

  He looks at me. He nods. I clap my hand over my mouth.

  “This is the book!” I shout out gleefully, my head flung back and arms spread wide.

  “When I look at them,” he says, eagerly, pacing the bridge as he thinks, “I see nineteen-year-olds on their first date.”

  “Keep going,” I say.

  He speaks quickly, excited. “I see the proposal a year later, and then a breakup, and then a second proposal. A wedding one parent can’t attend. Children underfoot. I see the kids grown up and moved away. I see betrayals, hailstorms, poems scrawled in birthday cards. Pets. Cold chicken. Trips to the in-laws’, lean years, and Saturday matinees.”

  “In other words,” I say, “the full rhapsodic spectacle of life.”

  He looks at me, his eyes a potent green. “Exactly.”

  A shiver passes through me.

  “How do they meet?”

  Noah tilts his head. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  Our eyes lock again and I smile because I love this idea, because he can write it, because it will be beautiful. And worth the wait.

  We did it. Against all odds, we found an idea. We should be celebrating—and yet . . . I feel an unexpected pang in my heart. Noah’s words at my apartment come back to me—his final condition that, once we agreed on a concept, I’d leave him alone to write it.

  Which means it’s the end of our Fifty Ways adventures. The end of our newly enjoyable in-person hangs. Noah has eight weeks to write a book . . . and I have eight weeks to wait for it.

  This is fine. This is good. This is what I wanted. Then why does it feel bittersweet?

  “Isn’t it funny?” I say. “We’ve both been watching them all these years. . . . Do you think we ever passed each other in the park? Maybe on this very bridge, without knowing it?”

  “Well,” he says, glancing over his shoulder toward the towering high-rise on Fifth Avenue.

  And I get it. The Gapstow Bridge, the Pond, Edward and Elizabeth—each is a piece of Noah’s penthouse view.

  “Would you like to see my office?” he asks.

  * * *

  The elevator door opens onto the most beautiful library I have ever seen. The smell of books is musty sweet. Three walls are made entirely of mahogany bookshelves, displaying a dazzling array of books. The other wall is a giant, single-paned window that looks out on Central Park at night. It’s the view I’ve always imagined for Noa Callaway. It’s perfect.

  “This is a little different from your studio,” I say.

  “I bought it after Ninety-Nine Things was published,” he says. “Terry got it in her mind that I needed to invest in something, but I didn’t want to move out of Pomander Walk. Buying this office was our compromise.”

  My eye is drawn to the massive wooden desk, upon which sits the only photograph in the room. In it, Noah’s barely twenty, grinning as he sits on a floral-print couch surrounded by three middle-aged women. One is kissing his cheek, and I recognize her as a younger Bernadette. Another appears to be giving him a noogie. I’m amazed to realize it’s Terry. I didn’t recognize her at first, because she’s actually smiling. A third woman sits next to him, holding his hand. She and Noah have the same eyes.

  “Is that your mom?”

  He nods, sadness coming into his expression. “That’s Calla.” Then he nods for me to follow him to the window.

  We stand side by side before a telescope. I can see the Gapstow Bridge. The city sparkles with lights coming on across the park. The moon is rising over midtown. For as much time as I’ve spent down there on the ground, it’s a completely different view up here.

  “What do you think?” Noah says.

  “It takes my breath away.”

  “I meant the book idea,” he says with a smile.

  I turn to him, my heart racing. “I meant the book idea, too.”

  It’s true, but it’s not the only thing leaving me breathless at the moment.

  “I want to write something you’re excited about,” Noah says. “Something you’d want to read, even if it wasn’t your job.”

  “I’ll read anything you write,” I tell him, putting my editor’s voice back on. “But, if you can write this book in the next eight weeks, I’ll have the added bonus of it still being my job to read it, too.”

  “I can,” Noah says with such easy confidence, I let myself believe him. “And now you can say yes.”

  “Say yes?” I ask.

  “To Italy. The launch. I’ll get the manuscript to you before you leave. You can edit it in time to celebrate with a glass of champagne on the plane.” He turns to me. We’re standing very close.

  “How will you celebrate?” I ask.

  “I have my ways.”

  “But what if—”

  “If the book falls apart,” he says, “and you need to cancel, I’ll take the blame for it with the Italians.”

  I know that should have been what I was thinking. But in the space of two seconds, I imagined planning this trip then canceling it, and it was my heart, not the Italians’, that felt broken.

  Don’t break my heart, I want to tell him, but that would be weird, right?

  “Can I ask why it matters to you that I go on this trip?” I say.

  “Because Positano is part of your story,” he says. “You should go see what it means. If this were a novel, Positano would change your life.”

  “If this were a novel, I’d edit that last line out,” I say, our faces just inches apart. “The foreshadowing’s too on the nose.”

  Noah smiles his slow, luxurious smile.

  “And I would beg you to keep it in,” he says, “at least until you read the last chapter.”

  “And I’d say, then you’d better get writing.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Next up is our summer Noa Callaway title,” Patrisse, our marketing director, says into the microphone at Peony’s April sales conference.

  It’s been three weeks since Noah and I took our fateful walk in Central Park, three weeks since we landed on the brilliant idea for his eleventh love story. Three weeks of intensely productive writing time—I hope. And three weeks since I started planning my trip to Positano.

  My plane tickets are booked. I’m flying into Naples in just over a month. Noa’s Italian publisher is treating me to a suite at Il Bacio hotel, and Bernadette has agreed to give me a few more riding lessons to prepare me for the Amalfi Coast highway.

  Noah and I haven’t talked or emailed or played online chess since I left his office that Saturday night, and the silence between us has felt big. But every time I’ve wanted to reach out to him, I’ve reminded myself of one simple fact: My livelihood relies on him turning in this book. We both need him to focus every ounce of his energy on writing fast and strong.

  I also didn’t tell him about today’s sales conference. For years, I watched Alix tear her hair out over Noa Callaway’s strong opinions on her presentations, the edits Terry would send—sometimes up until the moment the meeting began. Noa had dogmatic thoughts about everything, from the cover direction to the tagline on the ad campaign, from the distribution of advance reader copies to the phrasing of catalog copy. But until that manuscript is delivered, Noah needs to tunnel his vision on Edward and Elizabeth’s love story.

  In the meantime, I’ll handle the rest.

  Up at the podium, Patrisse’s clicker isn’t working, so the PowerPoint presentation stays stuck on the previous slide—the glossy, fully designed cover for a new book called The Bed Trick. It’s one of Emily Hines’s big summer titles, and the in-house buzz is buzzy.

  When Patrisse finally advances the slideshow, the contrast is stark. All of Peony’s upper management division now stares at a white screen with simple black font that reads only:

  CALLAWAY TITLE AND COVER TO COME.

  My stomach drops. My thinking had been that this is Noa’s eleventh book with Peony. We are literally pros at publishing Noa Callaway by now. Our robust Callaway marketing and publicity plans are well-oiled machines, tweaked only slightly each year, based on the content or theme of the new book. I’d hoped I could ride on Noa’s previous coattails today, even with little actual material to show the team.

  That might have been true . . . if this book weren’t already almost six months late. I see now the doubt in my colleagues’ faces. I see they fear the worst—about the manuscript, and about my role in publishing it.

  I feel them turning to look at me. Even Meg is grimacing. When Alix was editorial director, we always had a title, a fantastic cover, and an edited manuscript by the time sales conference rolled around.

  I’ve delivered sales conference materials for all four of my other titles on our summer list. I’ve approved the plans for the books of my entire team. I am not an abject failure! Only a failure with the one book that everyone’s actually counting on.

  Aude had been horrified by the paucity of Noa Callaway materials I’d given her to distribute before today’s meeting. She’d muttered in French for half the morning. I kept hearing the word disgrâce. Maybe Aude should have become Noa’s editor—maybe she’d have excised the manuscript from him already.

  “We know Lanie will get the manuscript out of Noa . . . eventually,” Patrisse says at the podium, and the room laughs uneasily. “Until then, we’re moving forward with our standard, successful plans for marketing Noa’s books across all platforms. Let’s consider this a developing story, shall we? Unless Lanie has news for us?”

  My chair squeaks as I stand up. This wasn’t planned, but I can’t walk out of my first sales conference as an editorial director looking like I don’t know what’s going on with our company’s biggest book. I’ve been running through my conversation with Noah on the Gapstow Bridge for weeks. I remember everything he said.

  “We have a working title,” I announce on a whim, locking eyes with a suddenly perked-up Sue. “Two Thousand Picnics in Central Park.”

  I know as soon as it’s passed my lips that it’s a knockout title. There are murmurs in the conference room.

  “I can run with that,” Brandi, our cover designer, says, making notes in her tablet. “With Callaway’s name on the cover, it sells itself.”

  “It’s going to be a very special book,” I promise the room. “It’s a love story spanning fifty years. And the characters?” I smile, picturing Edward and Elizabeth holding hands across their picnic table. “They’re incredible.”

  “When are we getting the manuscript?” Sue asks, knowing I can’t dodge the question in front of the whole company.

  “May fifteenth,” I say as confidently as I can. Just in time to keep my promotion.

  “You’re certain?” she asks. “That’s already pushing our production schedule to its limits. If we have to move to fall, that will change the budget considerably—”

  “It would be a nightmare,” Tony from finance calls at the back of the room.

  “You’ll have it,” I vow. My heart is racing. I sit back down.

  As Patrisse moves forward to the next slide, I pull out my phone under the conference table, and compose the email I’ve been reluctant to send.

  From: elainebloom@peonypress.com

  To: noacallaway@protonmail.com

  Date: April 13, 11:51 a.m.

  Subject: Edward and Elizabeth

  Are they finding their way?

  From: noacallaway@protonmail.com

  To: elainebloom@peonypress.com

  Date: April 13, 11:57 a.m.

  Subject: re: Edward and Elizabeth

  I was just about to write to you!

  They’re coming to life.

  Could we talk through the character arcs? I’d love your thoughts before I get too deep.

  I pore over the twenty-seven words of Noah’s email. Exclamation point after the first sentence—always a good sign! And he doesn’t seem bothered that I breached our agreement and made contact. But “before I get too deep,” suggests that he’s not yet deep in the writing. Just how un-deep is he? Ten thousand words? Two fifty? And the use of the word love . . .

  After sales conference adjourns, I race back to my desk, pick up the phone, and dial Terry, telling myself I will not take any of her guff today.

  “Hey . . .”

  It’s Noah’s voice. It sounds softer. Or is this just the way he speaks on the phone? It’s our first time.

  “Oh,” I say. “Hi. I thought I’d have to go through Terry. You’ve never answered this phone before.”

  Is he in his office? At that desk? Looking out at that view of Central Park? What’s he wearing? What’s he drinking? Does he have writing snacks?

  “Terry’s at the dentist.”

  “Well, that’s lucky. I mean, not for her dentist. I mean . . .” Is this what happens to me when I don’t talk to Noah for three weeks? I turn into a nervous wreck? “You wanted to talk?”

  “I do. I want your opinion. I was hoping we could meet, but then . . .” He pauses. “I got a call from my mom’s doctor, and I need to go see her. I’m catching a train this afternoon. I’ll be back Sunday, if that works for you—”

  “Do you want company?”

  There’s a pause. “On the train?” Noah says.

  He sounds surprised but not necessarily intruded upon, so I persevere.

  “A train’s as good a place as any for us to talk about your characters,” I say. “Right?”

  “You’d ride the train down to D.C. with me, just to talk about the book?”

  Now I’m fairly certain that Noah Ross sounds a little bit touched.

  “Well, you know,” I say, “interesting things happened the last time we were on a train together.” I smile at the memory of Noah pulling out that Swiss Army knife, breaking into Ryan’s brownstone. “I could even throw in a tuna sandwich with onions, or something equally pungent?”

  “If you meet me at Penn Station in two hours,” Noah says, “I’ll bring you the best egg drop wonton soup you’ve ever had.”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell my friend Meg’s mother that you said that, but I will meet you at Penn Station.”

  I’m grinning as I hang up the phone.

  * * *

  “Say goodbye to editing,” Noah says as I open the soup. “Because these wontons are about to blow your mind.”

  We’re pulling out of Penn Station with our laptops open on the table between us and way too much Chinese takeout for two people. Not surprisingly, the other passengers have given us a wide berth—empty seats abound. They’re probably jealous.