Ryan is a light sleeper. He finds the rattle uncharming. He finds most of my apartment’s quirks uncharming, and is working his way through their solutions.
“Where’s Alice?” I glance over Ryan’s shoulder at the small dog bed where my tortoise usually hangs out. Alice is eighty-six years old and very opinionated, especially about climate. I inherited her from my neighbor across the hall, Mrs. Park, when she moved to Florida. Alice and Ryan do not get along.
Ryan lifts a shoulder. “I think she went that way about an hour ago.” He gestures toward the bathroom.
I find Alice under my sink, where the pipe drips. “Good thing he hasn’t fixed the drip yet,” I whisper.
“Tortoises like heat,” Ryan says as I carry her back into the kitchen. “They’re cold-blooded.”
“Not Alice,” I say, adding ice to her water and setting out some cold cubes of orange from the fridge. “She’s sensitive. She thinks she’s a dog.”
“Maybe our next pet could be an actual dog? My brother just got a goldendoodle and—”
“Do not talk about Alice like she’s already gone. She could outlive you!”
He laughs. “How was the Valentine’s dance?” Ryan is always ever so slightly mistaken about what’s going on at my work. But tonight, I don’t correct him. To split hairs over the fact that the party’s theme was Vows not Valentines would open the vault of Wedding Conversations.
Namely ours. Ryan doesn’t understand why I start sweating when we talk venues. In his mind, we are two exceptionally capable decision makers, and, with the help of a professional planner, should be able to pull off this event with ease. He wishes—like everyone else wishes—that we could just set a date.
I pull the bottle of prosecco from my bag. Ryan clocks the fancy label and raises an eyebrow, intrigued.
“Now do you want the bad news or the good news first?” I ask.
He’s at my mirrored bar cart, where I keep BD’s champagne flutes. “What kind of lunatic wants the bad news first when there’s prosecco losing its chill?”
“You’ve got a point, pop that bottle, but still, I have to go in order. I’ll make it quick.” I duck as Ryan sends the cork ricocheting around my tiny kitchen. He splashes some foam into my glass.
“The bad news is, Alix isn’t coming back from maternity leave.”
“They fired her?” Ryan shakes his head. “She could file a discrimination—”
“No, no,” I cut him off. “It was her choice. To stay with her baby.”
“Makes sense,” Ryan says. “That’s what my sister-in-law did after the twins. A lot of women—”
“Ryan,” I say, putting my glass down and resting both hands on his shoulders. “What would you say if I told you that you are looking at the brand-new editorial director of Peony Press?”
Ryan blinks. It takes him a moment to realize that a response is in order. “I’d say, um, wow. That is unexpected . . . ly amazing. Are you serious?”
“No, I’m fucking with you,” I deadpan. “Of course I’m serious!” I fling my arms around him, excited. “When Sue told me, I thought I was getting fired.”
Ryan laughs. “You work your ass off for them. They had no choice but to promote you.” He pulls away from my embrace, clinks my glass, and takes a deep gulp.
I don’t drink. I feel myself shaking my head. His logic doesn’t feel quite right.
I do work hard, and that’s the side Ryan sees—the weekend afternoons when I’m editing, when it’s impossible to shake me out of storyland. But productivity isn’t what I want to be recognized for. I don’t put in long hours to edit more manuscripts at a faster rate than my colleagues. Manuscripts aren’t candy on a conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.
Editing is intuitive, alchemical. When I dive into an author’s first draft, I’m diving for the story I think she always wanted to tell, for a future book that readers around the world can pick up and find magic in.
“So, you accepted?” he says. “The promotion?”
“In what world would I not accept this promotion?” I say. “This my dream job, and years sooner than I would have dreamed of getting it. I’m taking over Noa Callaway!”
“Ah, the diva,” he says, turning his muscled back to me as he rebuilds my dishwasher.
I clear my throat. “The astonishingly brilliant, reason-I’m-in-publishing, demander-of-non-disclosure-agreement, four-months-past-her-deadline diva. Yes.”
“You’re obsessed with her,” is what Ryan says, and I can’t tell if he means this as an insult. He openly idolizes the senator he works for—so, is this simply, in Ryan’s mind, a statement of fact?
When Ryan meets someone he admires on the Hill, he buys their biography and becomes a disciple of their history and habits. I’ve never needed to know who lay behind the curtain. It is enough for me to share the same planet as Noa Callaway’s fabulous heroines.
Around our office there are competing theories about Noa Callaway’s true identity. Most imagine a fiftyish woman with teenage daughters, ergo worldliness with a youthful pulse. Aude said she heard from another assistant that the pseudonym comprised twin sisters who lived on either coast and swapped chapters by email. I have lunched with agents who said over Scandinavian gravlax they had credible intelligence that Noa is a forty-six-year-old gay man writing from a yacht off Fire Island, then begged me with their eyes to confirm that it was true.
I think about Sue’s warning—to keep our working relationship email-only—and something inside me resists. It’s my job to get Noa to deliver. If she’s truly struggling, and all I can do is email her, am I being set up to fail?
“Also,” I say to Ryan, “my promotion is provisional.”
Now he looks at me. “How do you mean?”
“I mean Sue said if I don’t get a number-one-New-York-Times-bestseller-worthy manuscript out of Noa in three months . . .”
I glance at him, waiting for him to complete my sentence with a confident, You’ll do it. He doesn’t. He’s back to focusing on the dishwasher. That’s when I realize he hasn’t even said congratulations.
“Hey,” I say, walking over to him, gently taking the wrench from his hands and tapping the side of his head. “What’s going on in there?”
Ryan wipes his hands on his jeans. “I’m proud of you, Lanie.”
He glances at my left hand, the empty finger where my ring will finally sit once its resizing is finished at the end of the month.
“But?” I say, even though I think I know. I need to hear it from him.
“We said after the holidays, we’d start planning the wedding,” he says. “Then, you got all swept up in that launch party. Now that’s over, and there’s this.”
I sigh. Even though I think we’re moving at a perfectly reasonable pace—we only got engaged in October—it often feels like Ryan thinks we should be married and pregnant by now. There have been a few arguments—not big blowouts, but enough to leave me tired whenever I think about it.
“Ryan,” I say softly.