“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.
“I’m worried this promotion will drop us down to the bottom of your list of priorities,” he says. “Our wedding. And everything else.”
Everything else. The words come quickly, quietly, almost spoken under his breath. Ryan and I have agreed that after the wedding I’ll join him in D.C. But the logistics of that move, and what they’ll mean for me and my career, have yet to crystallize. I can tell that Ryan’s thinking my promotion doesn’t do our plans to cohabitate any favors.
Then there’s the religion question, whether I’ll convert to Christianity. It’s important to Ryan that whatever future kids we have share the same religion as both their parents. I’m not particularly religious, but neither have I managed to get on board with converting. It feels wrong to change myself so we can become some WASPy united front on a future campaign trail. What is this, 1956? Even more than that, I can’t imagine telling BD that I’m not a Jew anymore and neither will her great-grandchildren be.
These are big questions, ones we’ve both gotten skilled at sweeping under the rug since our engagement. It never feels like a good time to tackle them. Tonight I’m too tired—and too elated—to even entertain possible answers. So I tell Ryan the thing that always makes me feel better when I worry about the hows of our future.
“You’re my Ninety-Nine Things,” I say, taking his hands. The fact that Ryan is so indisputably perfect for me matters a lot in my book. But he doesn’t smile like he usually does.
I turn to the prosecco for help. I put both our glasses back in both of our hands. I meet Ryan on his level, which is a practical, plan-making level. “What do you say the next time we’re in D.C., we go look at those wedding venues your mom wanted to show us?”
“Really?” he says.