“Why would you get fired?” Rufus pauses. “Do you think anyone else saw you stealing those office supplies last month?”

  “It was a box of tissues!” More hissing. I can’t not at this point. “I had bronchitis!”

  “Lanie.” Sue sweeps into the office, passing me to hang up her white cardigan—this one has a kind of corset look going on at the back, which only Sue could make look classy.

  “Good as new, Sue,” Rufus proclaims, setting Sue’s printer back on its shelf below her desk.

  “Always with the words I like to hear, Rufus,” Sue says, taking a seat across from me on her white couch.

  “I’ll just be going.” He says the words I want to hear, mouthing good luck to me as he closes the door.

  “How are you?” Sue asks me once we’re alone.

  “Good. Fine.”

  With her pearls and capsule uniform, with her silver-blond, chin length hair always looking like it’s just been drybarred, Sue is so put together that even after all these years, it can strike fear into my heart to look at her. Once, the two of us were escorting an author to an event at a mall in a Westchester suburb. We had an hour to kill before the signing, and Sue bought me a fancy spatula at Williams Sonoma, telling me I’d never make a French rolled omelet without it. I feel like she can look at me and sense that, two years later, I have never swatted a fly without it.

  “How are things shaping up for the launch?”

  “Brilliantly.” I take out my phone to show her the photo I’d taken earlier for Alix. This picture is worth a thousand of the words I’m too nervous now to say.

  “I wish I could make it,” Sue says.

  “We’ll splash the launch all over social media. It’ll be like you were there.”

  Sue smiles cryptically at the image going black on my cell phone before looking directly at me. The smile fades.

  “Listen, Lanie,” she begins, “what I’m about to say isn’t going to be easy for you.”

  I hold my breath, gripping my armrests. If she fires me, I honestly don’t know what I’ll do. Ryan tells me all the time how many jobs there are out there that I’d be great at, but that’s because he wants me to move to D.C. I don’t want another job. I want this one.

  Sue opens a folder on her lap, flips through a few pages. Torturing me.

  “Shoot. It’s not here.” She rises and goes to the door, sounding slightly piqued. “Frank? The document?”

  There’s scuffling outside and Frank’s apologetic murmurs. While Sue waits at the door, I look away, as from a surgeon about to amputate one of my limbs. I face her oversized windows and watch the snow falling on the café awning across the street.

  And of course, this is the view I’d have while getting fired. That café is the place where I got this job, seven years ago.

  I was twenty-two, just out of college, and wildly optimistic. The week before graduation I had come across a job posting online:

  Editorial Assistant, Peony Press.

  By then, I was an English minor, but for all intents and purposes, still pre-med. In an instant, my plans to move home and spend the summer studying for the MCAT? Poof. Gone. This was a sign. I was never meant to be a doctor. I was on this earth to bring more stories like Ninety-Nine Things into the world.

  I took a Greyhound up to New York. I slept on friends’ parents’ couches in various boroughs, and waitressed at a Greek diner while I waited for Peony Press to call.

  They didn’t. Nor did any of the other publishers where I applied for jobs.

  By September, my couch prospects and my dad’s patience ran out in the form of a plane ticket home. The day before my flight back to Atlanta, a visitor arrived in Queens. I stood on my friend Ravi’s mom’s fire escape, squinting into hazy sun at what appeared to be my grandmother.

  Lest any cookie-baking, tissue-up-the-sleeve images form in your mind, let me set you straight: My bubby Dora is a fighter. She survived Auschwitz, and after her family immigrated to America, she became one of three women in her graduating class at Yale School of Medicine. When she gave me The Talk in eighth grade, it was a weekend-long celebration, culminating in popcorn and a screening of Dangerous Liaisons. For as long as I can remember BD has drunk exclusively from a coffee mug that reads BADASS MOTHERFUCKER.

  “Which way is this Peony Press?” she called up to me on the fire escape.

  “That depends. Do you have a bomb?”

  “Darling, I’m wearing Chanel. It doesn’t really go.” My grandmother jerked a thumb at the idling taxi behind her. “I’ve got this very handsome gentleman waiting to take us there, so please come down. We’ll wave goodbye to the one that got away, I’ll buy you a martini, and tomorrow, I’ll take you home.”

  We sat for hours at the café across the street from Peony’s office. She told me the same stories that never got old about my mom when she’d been twenty-two. She was adding new details, things I didn’t know about the time Mom skipped her graduation to see Prince on his Purple Rain tour—when I realized there was something I had never asked my grandmother.

  “BD.” I brought out my old copy of Ninety-Nine Things from my canvas bag. I’d kept it with me, like a totem, ever since I’d come to New York. “Do you remember what Mom said to me right before she died?”

  “You could fill a book with all the things I don’t remember, honey,” she said, but with that little wink that let me know she did remember, only she wanted me to tell the tale.

  “She said she wanted me to find someone I really, really loved. But she didn’t say how. Or when. I just can’t figure out if I’m going about it—my life—in the right way.”

  “If I could solve the mystery for you, I would,” she said, patting my cheek, “but then, what the hell would the fun of life be?”

  I knew she was right, annoying as it was. BD took a picture of me holding the book, with the Peony office through the window in the background.

  “One day,” she said, “in the comfort of your unknowable future, you’ll look at this picture, and you’ll be glad we took it today.”

  And that was when Alix de Rue stepped into the café for a decaf cappuccino.

  I recognized her from the photograph accompanying the only interview I’d found online related to Noa Callaway. She was five feet tall in kitten heels with a short blond bob, glossy lips, and a giant purple scarf. I nudged BD.

  “That’s the one who got away.”

  “The editor?” BD gasped. “Go talk to her.”

  “Hell no.”

  “If you don’t, I will,” BD said. She was one large dirty martini in. “I’d hate to see you lose the job to me.”

  I downed the cold rest of my coffee and stood up. “You’re right. That would suck.”

  I moved toward the bar, heart suddenly pounding. “Miss De Rue?” I offered my hand. “I’m Lanie Bloom. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m a huge fan of Noa Callaway.”

  “Me, too,” she said and smiled at me briefly before returning to her laptop.

  I took a breath. “The editorial assistant position—”

  “Has been filled.”

  “Oh.” Even though I already sensed this, even though I’d never even gotten a form email back from HR, I felt my heart collapse like a detonated building.

  “Did your new assistant do this?” BD asked, suddenly behind me, thrusting my copy of Ninety-Nine Things under Alix de Rue’s nose. It was opened to the back pages where I’d written out my list.

  I could have sunk into a puddle of shame watching Alix de Rue read what I’d written about Scorpios in the sack. When I’d made this list, I’d felt free. Now I thought about my mother and wondered whether she would be embarrassed.

  “I told Noa readers would fill this out,” Alix said, more softly now, touching the page with cuticle-bitten fingertips.

  “This book changed my life,” I confessed as Alix handed it back. “I guess I don’t have much to show for it yet, unemployed and begging strangers for jobs at cafés with my drunk grandmother—”

  “Tipsy,” BD corrected me.

  “But someday . . .” I said to Alix, with a little laugh, attempting levity.

  “My new assistant hates ‘love stories,’ ” Alix said. “He’s someone’s nephew from our parent company and I was asked to give him a trial period.”

  “Is that so?” BD asked, giving me a vaudeville wink.

  Alix narrowed her eyes and seemed to take all of me in at once: my atrociously heavy tote bag, my scuffed white tennis shoes, the eight pounds I’d lost that summer from worry and walking and late-night discounted bodega salad bars, my slightly greasy, too-long bangs, my college girl’s jean jacket, and my desperate, romantic hope that my dream might not actually be absurd.

  “What I love about love stories is their bravery,” I said.

  “What other writers do you love? Not only Noa Callaway?”

  “Elin Hilderbrand. André Aciman. Zadie Smith. Sophie Kinsella. Madeline Miller. Christina Lauren—” They tumbled from me. I might never have stopped if Alix hadn’t waved me off.

  “All right, all right.” She laughed. “Good.”

  “But most deeply”—I held Noa Callaway’s book to my chest—“her.”

  Alix took a ream of papers from her leather bag. She riffled through them and eventually handed me a thick stack bound by a rubber band. She slapped a business card on top.

  “Read this tonight. Email me your thoughts tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Now—seven years, twenty-nine thousand paper jams, two apartments, three promotions, one inherited tortoise, eighteen flings ranging from scorching to moronic, two world-ending highlights mishaps, and eight bestselling novels later—is it all coming to a sudden, screeching end?

  Sue walks back to her white chair, holding an ominous stack of papers. She uncrosses and recrosses her legs.

  “Lanie,” she says. “Alix isn’t coming back.”

  As I probe deep for a poker face, I feel shock spreading over my features. This is not what I’d prepared myself for.

  “She’s decided to stay home with Leo.”

  I’d known Alix was anxious about coming back to work, about putting her son into day care—but she loves this job. Sorrow weighs in my limbs. Alix is my mentor and my friend. Alix is my advocate at Peony. I want to talk to her, to hear this news in her words, but as I sit across from Sue, I become aware of the quizzical look on her face. She hasn’t brought me here only to deliver this news. There’s also my fate to attend to. Collateral damage.

  “We need to talk about Noa Callaway,” Sue says.

  “The manuscript.” I nod, my stomach twisting.

  “Where is it?” Sue asks.

  “It . . . well, it’s . . . I don’t know.”

  “It’s four months late, Lanie.”

  “Yes, it is.” And now Alix won’t be coming back to rescue it.

  Sue tilts her head, looks hard at me. “One might expect author and editor to be on their third round of revisions by now.”

  “That’s true, one might. But with Alix’s leave, and, well, Noa’s process has always been unique—”

  “Noa has never delivered late. Not once. These books determine our budget. They are our budget. Noa Callaway delivering on time allows you to sign up that little . . . what was it, the debut?”

  “The Beginning of a Beautiful,” I say. My most recent acquisition, won in a hard-fought auction, is a queer Casablanca reboot by a debut author from Morocco.

  “I know, Sue. I know how important Noa’s deadlines are to the whole company.”

  “And yet,” she says, “you haven’t been able to get Noa to deliver.”

  “She’s working on it,” I say. “We emailed this morning and . . .”

  But what had Noa and I emailed about this morning? Not the manuscript in question. Our emails are like banter between old friends. I have long played the yin to Alix’s yang—and until Alix left for maternity leave, everyone seemed comfortable with that. I love my emails with Noa. She makes me laugh. She writes things to me I know her readers would trade years of their lives to read. But no one ever will. They’re just for me.

  This morning, I’d sent Noa a link to the cake balloons for her launch, and she’d responded with a GIF of a woman being lifted off into the Manhattan skyline by a vast bouquet of balloons.

  Let me know what time you’ll be passing by. I’ll wave you onward from my window. Wonder where you’ll land. . . .

  I know Noa lives at 800 Fifth Avenue, and I am guilty of having scoped out the building while jogging once or twice. I can see her there, at her luxury window, a pair of binoculars pressed to her eyes. I like to picture her looking something like a young Anjelica Huston.

  Noa’s working title for this next book is Thirty-Eight Obituaries—we’ll have to change that, but the premise is great. It’s going to be about a young journalist who lands her first job at her dream newspaper, only to find it’s in the obituary department. The hook, as Alix pitched it to me, is that the protagonist’s first assignment is to prepare the obituary for a young, hard-living enfant-terrible sculptor. In case he dies doing one of his increasingly dangerous artistic stunts, they’ll have the obit ready to go. Cue the unexpected love story.

  It’s so on-brand Noa Callaway that it seems like it should write itself. So what is going on with Noa that she can’t finish it?

  I suddenly wonder whether Alix knew something was wrong with this next book. It was due before she went on maternity leave. Was part of her decision not to come back . . . her anticipation of a Noa Callaway catastrophe?

  “When Alix left on maternity leave,” Sue says, “she told me she had faith in you, Lanie. I can understand that during her absence, you’ve been in a holding pattern with Noa. But now—”

  I meet Sue’s eyes because this feels like the moment she’s going to lower the boom. I think of my favorite Noa Callaway line, from her third novel, Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad:

  Life’s greatest mystery is whether we shall die bravely.

  If my career is about to die, I’d like to meet its end bravely. But I don’t feel brave. I feel terrified, like I’m losing my balance at the end of a plank.

  “I need you,” Sue says, “to take over.”

  “Take over,” I say slowly. “Noa Callaway?”

  Am I not fired? Apparently, I’m not fired.

  Sue looks at the photos of her sons, at her ferns. Then at me, and she sighs.

  “As you know, Noa is . . . difficult.”

  I feel her waiting for me to agree. I haven’t met Noa personally, nor spoken to her by phone, but from the interactions we’ve had, I consider her eccentricities to be like those of any genius. She can be cryptic and occasionally short via email, but more frequently, there’s a sparkle to our correspondence that sets it apart.

  When we worked together on her sixth book, Twenty-One Games with a Stranger—about two rival gamers who hate each other in their waking lives but slowly fall in love in their dreams—Alix wanted to cut a scene where the characters play chess at a gaming convention. She said it was out of step with the techie aesthetic that was working in the rest of the book.

  I learned to play chess from BD the summer my mother died, and I sensed that the chess scene in Noa’s draft was a metaphor for the larger romantic relationship. The interplay of strategy and patience. In my notes to Alix, I spelled out how Noa might drive this point home with a few light edits. It was the first time Alix copied and pasted a paragraph of mine directly into one of her editorial letters. The day after Alix sent the letter off, I got an invitation to play online chess from Noa Callaway. She didn’t have to mention that she’d sensed my influence in the letter. We’ve been playing ever since.

  “Given the circumstances,” Sue says, “it makes sense to promote you. Provisionally.”

  I blink.

  “Tomorrow you’ll become Peony’s youngest editorial director. Provisionally.”

  “Sue,” I whisper. That’s a big promotion. “Thank you!”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Sue says. “This is only a trial. Three months. If you can’t get a number-one-New-York-Times-bestseller-worthy manuscript out of Noa by then, I’ll find someone who can.”

  “I can do it,” I say without thinking. I have no idea how, but I’ll find a way.

  If I can’t get Noa to deliver a great book, it’s not just our fiscal year that will suffer. It’s my whole career. It’s the Casablanca reboot. It’s the paranormal ballet romance written by the sweetest seventy-year-old former dancer with an unparalleled gift for hot sex scenes. It’s the #ownvoices imprint Aude and I dreamed of launching next year. “I won’t let you down, Sue.”

  “Good.” Sue slides me the stack of papers. “Sign here.”

  “What’s this?” I ask as I realize exactly what it is. A detailed non-disclosure agreement.

  “Just a precaution,” Sue says.

  “Oh my god,” I say as it hits me. “Wait, I’m not actually going to meet Noa Callaway? Noa never meets anyone in person.”

  “Let’s keep it that way.” Sue’s smile is stiff and a little too wide. “Focus on the book, Lanie. Get Noa Callaway to deliver. And buckle your seat belt. You may be in for some turbulence.”

  Chapter Four

  At seven o’clock, at the tail end of the launch’s cocktail hour, I’m waiting in the greenroom at the Hotel Shivani, halfway recovered from my meeting with Sue. My speech is memorized. I had to write it a month ago so it could be vetted by Alix, by Terry, and, ostensibly by Noa—though she never remarked on it to me. All I have to change is the line about me standing in for Noa’s editor to say I am Noa’s editor. That should be easy enough.

  Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today . . .