By Any Other Name(6)

It’s Frank, executive assistant to our president and publisher, Sue Reese.


Can you meet with Sue at 4:30?



I blink at the message. It’s four-fifteen right now.

My chest tightens. In all the years I’ve worked at Peony, Sue’s calendar has been meticulously organized weeks in advance. She doesn’t do impromptu.

Something’s up. Something big.





Chapter Three


Sue’s assistant, Frank, is the kind of man who always offers you hot tea with a great big smile when you arrive for a meeting, then frowns when you take him up on it. Generally, I make a habit of trying not to annoy Frank, but today I’m so nervous that I accidentally blurt out “yes.”

“Hmph,” Frank says, rising from his desk with the kettle.

“Do you know what this meeting is about?” I ask, following him to the kitchen.

Frank has been Sue’s assistant for over twenty years, ever since she founded Peony in the late nineties. I’ve seen him rattle off a thousand facts about Sue into the phone, right off the top of his head—her passport number, her mother-in-law’s favorite flowers, the date of her last gynecological exam.

“I don’t think you’re getting fired,” he calls over his shoulder, “but I’ve been wrong before.”

“Thanks.”

“You don’t take milk or sugar or anything, right?” he asks, his tone directing me toward the right answer.

I shake my head.

“The toughest people take it straight.” He hands me the mug, then says more brightly, “Go on in. She’ll be right with you.”

I open the door to our publisher’s corner office and step tentatively inside. Sue’s spa—as Meg and I call it—is the only office at Peony that doesn’t look like a romance publishing office. Every other employee has some variation of wall-to-wall bookshelves crammed with loudly colored spines, but Sue’s office is entirely white. The white desk is devoid of papers, the white leather chairs are smooth as cream, and the white modernist coat rack harbors three white cardigans, each one with some expensive flourish, like pale pink leather elbow patches.

The only pops of color come from three large hanging ferns and three framed photographs of sons who look like mini-Sues but with braces. I’ve never met Sue’s kids before, but I have seen her water her plants, and her surprising devotion to them lets me know she’s a really good mom.

I’m doing this square breathing trick Meg taught me, trying to stay calm as I settle into Sue’s white guest cloud, when a man pops up from behind Sue’s desk. We scream at the same time.

“Rufus, what the hell?” I hiss. I can hiss at him because he’s my friend. It’s a love hiss. “What are you doing here?”

“Um, my job?” he says, rolling out his neck, which is always sore because he over-Pilates because he has the long-standing, unrequited hots for Brent, the instructor at Pilates World.

“Well, get out! Come back later. I have a meeting.”

“Sue’s printer broke,” he says, fiddling with some cables in a way that makes me suspect he won’t be done anytime soon. “Just because I’ve had to resurrect your hard drive from the underworld—is it three times now?—does not mean I don’t also perform valuable IT for the rest of this company.”

“In my defense—”

“Oh, I dare you.” He shakes his head in pity.

“Mercury was in retrograde!”

“Permanently?” He laughs. “Why are you hissing so much?”

“I hiss when I’m nervous,” I hiss, glancing out the open door. “Frank used the word fired.”

Rufus rolls his big brown eyes, which reassures me. A little. He thinks this is absurd. Then again, he doesn’t know about Noa Callaway’s egregiously missed deadline.

“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?”