“And maybe Noa Callaway has never sampled its delicacies or thought about writing of them. He writes about the big tourist attractions. Show him your New York.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Remember when you took me to the Lithuanian consulate for Užgavėnės a couple years ago? That was fun!”

  “I remember you went home with the consulate general’s phone number,” I say.

  “Exactly. I’d even go so far as to call it inspiring.”

  “I took you there because I love you. Because I wasn’t scared you’d mock it or think it was boring. I am not showing that man my New York.”

  “You know it’s a good idea, though,” BD says, sipping the last of her coffee.

  “He probably does need to get out from behind his desk more often,” I acknowledge. “At the park, he had the look of someone who hasn’t seen the sun in a month.”

  “See?”

  “I could ask Terry to take to him to some new places,” I say. “I wish I could get overtime approved for Aude to do it. She’d have him whipped into shape in a week. . . .”

  “Lanie, you are Noa Callaway’s editor.” BD shoulders her Birkin and rises from the table. “If Noa doesn’t write this book, Terry and Aude will still have jobs. Will you?”

  I worry a hole in the paper tablecloth, not liking where this conversation is headed. Not able to stop it, either.

  “Fine,” I say, standing up. “I will consider proposing a visit to someplace in New York that Noah Ross has likely overlooked.”

  BD links an arm through mine as we leave the restaurant. “I foresee success.”

  We step back into the city for the pleasant stroll up to Lincoln Center, where she’ll meet her League of Widows.

  “I’m glad you’re so confident,” I say as we wait for a crosstown bus to pass. “Should I remind you that in Fifty Ways, the plan backfired horribly? They were supposed to break up their parents. They ended up breaking up themselves, climactically—at their parents’ wedding.”

  “Yes, but that was fictional kismet,” BD says and winks at me. “You are my real, live granddaughter, whom I’m proud of and believe in. You are going to rise to this occasion like a Tinder date with a pocket full of Viagra.”

  “BD!” I groan. “I’m going to have to work so hard to erase that mental image.”

  “I’m sorry, doll, but I couldn’t resist.”

  Chapter Eight

  On Tuesday, I work from home, ostensibly to edit the third draft of the paranormal ballet manuscript. But really, I am busting my ass to clean my apartment, from worn floorboards to art deco crown-molded ceiling. I may be a mess, but my apartment doesn’t have to be.

  I’ve mopped and I’ve dusted. I’ve taken a toothbrush to my grout. I’ve fluffed every pillow and gone through two bottles of Windex. My toilet bowl is sparkling, and the inside of my refrigerator is now scrubbed of last week’s experiment in wilted arugula. I even bought one of those vacuum robots, which is presently chasing poor Alice around my living room and will probably give her tortoise nightmares.

  All this because I had the superb idea of inviting Noah Ross over for an editorial powwow.

  We can go ahead and blame Terry, who nixed five in a row of my perfectly good ideas for cafés, bistros, and teahouses around the city where the two of us might discreetly meet. Too busy, said Terry, or too loud, or too near the publishers’ lunch circuit (it was on Eleventh Avenue, please!). She rejected one place because they only serve two-percent milk.

  Terry was pushing for Noa’s Fifth Avenue penthouse—less hassle for him, was the phrase actually employed—but after last weekend at the chess house, I learned my lesson about meeting Noah on his turf.

  Thus I boldly threw my hat-sized apartment into the ring. And I guess Terry couldn’t come up with any objections that wouldn’t have sounded prohibitively rude, so she ended up agreeing. I’d felt vindicated hanging up the phone.

  Ten seconds later, the cleaning panic set in.

  My goal is to make my apartment a completely neutral site, where the water stains on my windowsill and the lopsided lampshade in the entry hall won’t distract us from focusing on Noa Callaway’s next book.

  The trouble is, I’m realizing how much in my apartment speaks volumes about me. Volumes that I don’t want Noah Ross to hear. My vintage bar cart, for example, boasting BD’s blown glass cocktail shaker, martini set, and the collection of bespoke vermouths left over from the New Year’s Eve party when Rufus and I went a little too nuts on Negronis. I stare at it now for ten minutes, wondering if its prominent place in my living room says your editor knows how to have fun or your editor knows how to black out on a Monday night. I wheel it all the rattling way into my bedroom before I realize that if, on the off chance, Noah Ross were to open my bedroom door, thinking it was the bathroom, it would be way worse for him to see my bedside speakeasy.

  Then there’s my bookshelf. My carefully curated pride and joy, whose space is so limited I feel it keeps me honest. But now I’m wondering: Is it serious enough? Is it light enough? Is it diverse enough? Is it classic enough? Are Noa Callaway’s books prominent enough? Are they too prominent?

  Noah is going to be looking at this shelf and forming opinions about it, about me. We’re book people. It’s what we do. Should I try to make room for the copy of War and Peace I use as a doorstop in my closet?

  “I know it looks like I’m losing my mind,” I say to Alice, who is glaring at the robot vacuum from the safety of her dog bed. “But sometimes, this is what being a boss looks like.”

  Noah is supposed to arrive at three o’clock, when the south-facing windows of my living room let in their softest light. By two-fifty, I’ve changed out of sweats and into a white peasant blouse and what Meg calls my “adult jeans,” because they need to be ironed. Though I’m tempted to put on the Fendi suit again, just to fuck with him.

  I’ve got my French press packed with freshly ground espresso, a clean fridge chilling whole milk, and almond milk, and damn it, I bought something called oat milk, too—okay, Terry? I’ve got Pellegrino and a box of pastries from the only bakery in midtown Aude finds edible. All that and a stomach full of nerves.

  I don’t know whether my Fifty Ways plan is actually going to work, but that’s not even on today’s menu of worries. Today is about getting him to agree to try it out.

  At two fifty-eight, I position myself at my bedroom window, overlooking the entrance to my building. I may or may not be hiding behind my ficus plant when a black town car slows to a stop on the street below.

  “Typical,” I mutter, thinking what a hassle it must have been for Noah to be chauffeured down here in his town car’s heated seats.

  But then, the driver comes around to open the back door, and out slides a blond woman in a floor-length rabbit fur coat. She’s toting four sweater-vested shih tzus and an extra-long selfie-stick. I’m waiting for Noah to get out after her, for this to be his type. Instead the driver closes the door, waves goodbye to the woman, and the next thing I notice is a commotion on the street corner.

  It’s Noah Ross, arriving on foot from an unknown direction, staring into his phone—and getting fully entangled in four shih tzu leashes. He hops to get free of one leash then ensnares himself in two more. The woman with the dogs is getting really pissed. The dogs are yapping as she brandishes her selfie-stick at Noah and yanks her leashes so violently he almost bites it on the pavement.

  Here I’d been so nervous to host a man currently getting tag-teamed by four specks of fur in argyle. I smile to myself and enjoy the show.

  Until my buzzer rings.

  Then I scramble to the phone in the hallway, pick it up, and jam my finger on the pound sign to unlock the downstairs door. After that comes the hardest part: the wait for him to walk up five flights of stairs.

  I use the time to take a final look around my apartment. At the last moment, my gaze falls on the framed photograph of Ryan and me at the Nationals game on the night we got engaged. We’re grinning, cheek to cheek, and he’s holding up my hand to show the ring, which was too small to get over my knuckle so it sits jammed midway down my finger. I hate how I look in the picture: deer-in-the-headlights with mascara all the way down to my chin from crying. But Ryan had the photo enlarged, matted, and framed, so it hangs on the wall near the window. The look on my face is so intimate that suddenly I know I can’t bear for Noah Ross to see it. I snatch it off the wall just as my doorbell rings.

  “Be right there!” I shout, frantically looking for a place to stash the frame. The lower shelf of my coffee table is an understated mausoleum of old magazines. I wedge the frame between some old Cosmos and New Yorkers then steel myself to let Noah in.

  You can do this. BD believes in you.

  “Hello!” I say, forcing brightness into my voice as I swing open my door.

  And there he is. His hair is damp from a shower, and he’s dressed up in a linen collared shirt, dark blue slacks, and stylish brown leather brogues. His pea coat is draped over his arm—no one can do a five-floor walk-up wearing that much wool.

  I just saw him downstairs through my window, but it’s startling to face him at close range. I still have trouble believing that he is Noa Callaway. I’m still, to be honest, pretty mad about it. He looks flushed, a little off, and I remind myself he’s just climbed seventy-eight stairs and been accosted by shih tzus, so I give him a moment’s grace.

  “What can I get you to drink?” I say.

  He steps through my doorway as if into an active volcano. “This is . . . your apartment?”

  “Home sweet home,” I say.

  We both survey the scene of my one-bedroom pre-war walk-up. Lovingly furnished with estate-sale finds and BD’s hand-me-downs and lived in for six years by yours truly.

  “I didn’t realize the address Terry gave me was your home,” Noah says, determined to harp on this.

  “Where did you assume I had invited you?”

  “I don’t make assumptions,” he says.

  “How benevolent,” I say and let him stew in whatever he’s trying to insinuate about my apartment. I refuse to apologize for the state of my living quarters, even as I can’t help wishing I’d made room for War and Peace on the bookshelf.

  I become aware of an acute discomfort in Noah. He’s stuck in the doorway and doesn’t seem to know what to do.

  “There’s a hook behind you for your coat,” I say, and then we fumble over who will hang it up.

  “Espresso?” I say. I’m eager to leave the hallway and make it to my slightly more spacious kitchen. “I’m fresh out of two-percent milk, but I have whole, or almond, or . . . oatmeal, I think.” I glance at him. “That was a joke? Terry mentioned some issue with two-percent, oh never mind . . .”

  He’s looking at me blankly.

  “I can just make the espresso and—”

  “No, thanks,” Noah says. He walks past my kitchen and into the living room. He sinks down on the couch and looks, for a moment, almost normal there. Then he ruins it with a snarky, “It’s not like this is going to take long, is it?”

  “You’re in a charming mood,” I call from the kitchen, making myself a stupid espresso because I paid eleven dollars for it at Blue Bottle. Then I hear my words on playback and I wince. “What I mean is, no, I won’t waste your time.”

  Espresso in hand, I meet him in the living room. As I reach for my notes, there comes a rustling from underneath the coffee table. Noah jumps about a foot off the couch.

  “What was that?” he says.

  “I have a tortoise. Alice. It was probably her,” I explain. “Do pets bother you?”

  “No. It’s fine. I just ran into some aggressive dogs outside your apartment. Made me jumpy.”

  I bite back a laugh. “That must have been scary.”

  Noah’s peering under the coffee table as Alice pokes her head out. She appraises him discerningly, in the form of her trademark slow blink. An actual smile lights up his face.

  “Hello, Alice,” he says, his voice exuding a friendliness apparently reserved for reptiles.

  “It can take her a couple decades to warm up to new people,” I say, but then Alice blows my mind by taking one step and then another in Noah’s direction.

  Unfortunately, her advance disrupts the equilibrium of all the crap I’ve shoved under the coffee table. And out slides the framed picture of newly engaged Ryan and me. It clatters to my hardwood floor.

  Noah picks up the frame, and I die a slow death watching him study it closely. He glances at me, then at the photo again. At last, he tilts his head to see under the coffee table.

  “Is this where you keep all your ex-boyfriends?”

  “He is not my ex-boyfriend—”

  “Oh, right.” He points at my hand in the photograph. “The ring. Ex-fiancé?”

  “Don’t worry about him!” I say and snatch the picture from his hands.

  “Sorry,” Noah says. “Occupational hazard.”

  I’m angry that he’s seen what I look like when I cry, guilty that I’d shoved Ryan under the coffee table for this asshole. I return the photo to its place on the wall.

  Noah watches all of this with great interest, eyebrows annoyingly raised, and by the time I get back to my chair across the couch from him, Alice is sitting in his lap.

  “We’ve bonded,” he announces, giving her a pat on the head in the one place she will accept affection.

  I rub my temples, trying to focus. “Do you know why I asked you here today?”

  “Because I didn’t turn in my homework on Saturday?” he says.

  I narrow my eyes at him. “Because I know you don’t have a book.”

  “I told you—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I wave him off. “Irons in the fire. Look, what I need is for you to have an actual idea that I can sell to Sue.”

  He opens his mouth to argue. I’m not having it.

  “To that end,” I continue, “I thought about what you said the other day. About having run out of New York City landmarks for your characters to kiss in front of? And so, I have prepared a list of landmarks you have never written about, and may have never considered.” I hold up my notebook. “You’re going to look at my list. You’re going to cross off the places you’ve been to. Then, one by one, we’re going to visit the places left on the list until you find something worth writing about.”

  “Lanie—”

  “Talk to the list.” I set it down in front of him.

  Fifty overlooked New York City landmarks. They are numbered in order of my personal preference, but all of them are gems. At the top, in an effort to inject a touch of playfulness, I’ve written the header Fifty Ways to Break Up Noah and His Writer’s Block.

  “Do you have a pen?” he asks, stone faced and unappreciative of my good humor.

  I hand over my pen. Noah crosses something out. I lean forward, watch as he retitles the page: Fifty Ways to Break Up Lanie and Her Anxiety.

  “Just some light edits,” he says.

  I want to tell him that my anxiety and his writer’s block are not mutually exclusive, that they are, in fact, in every way intertwined. But I hang back, because now he’s actually reading the list.

  I’d spent most of Sunday drafting it after my brunch with BD. I had scoured the internet. I had paged through four old diaries. I had texted friends for help jogging my memory about the city’s little wonders that we’ve stumbled upon over the years.

  To Rufus: Remind me how we scaled the back of the Pepsi-Cola sign in Gantry Plaza after that BBQ in Astoria?

  He’d written back: All I remember is it involved a stolen fire ladder and a whole lot of Tanqueray.

  To Meg: Does your mom-friend still live in that romantic little enclave on the UWS? Intel on how a girl might get access to the garden for an hour?

  She’d written back: You mean Pomander Walk? That mom and I had a falling-out over gluten allergies. But the bish needs my help planning the school’s spring fundraiser, so lemme see what I can do.

  My friends are used to these kinds of inquiries by now. They’ve stopped asking why and simply trust they’ll someday see the results in the pages of a book.

  In this case, I really, really hope they will.

  “What do you think?” I ask Noah when I can wait no longer.

  “I think I made a good impression Saturday,” he says. “You really want to hang out with me. Fifty times.”

  I grit my teeth. “More like I want to keep my job. For fifty years.”

  “You’re serious about this?” He meets my eyes then shakes his head in disbelief. “Then I’d really better think of something, or there’s a lot of suffering in our future.”

  My eyes flash. “What is so wrong with this list?”

  “The Austrian Cultural Forum? You want to spend a Saturday with me at the Austrian Cultural Forum?”

  “It’s an architectural marvel! Twenty-four stories high and just twenty-five feet wide!”

  “Well, bravo to the architect,” he says. “But just because the two of us stand before this marvel doesn’t mean a book idea will fall into my head.”

  “Why are you pretending that the concept of inspiration is so foreign to you?” I snap at him. “You’ve written ten books. Surely you know by now that writers go out in the world, look around, and get ideas?”

  “Not like this,” he says. “I can save us both a lot of torture by stating now: It’s not going to work.”

  “You know what else isn’t working?” I say. “Whatever you’ve been doing. You’re four months late and have nothing to show for it.” I sigh. “Please. Don’t leave Peony hanging like this. People are counting on you. You might not care about that, but I do. . . .”

  I trail off because to say more feels futile. Why should he care about what I care about? He doesn’t owe me anything, even if he did spend the last seven years email-masquerading as my friend. It was only that, a masquerade.