By Any Other Name(8)

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.