“We love the book unconditionally, Mr. Milstead, and we are very, very keen on being part of your future as an author. But I feel—” and here she exchanged a look with her boss “—that, as with every novel, we’d like to engage an editor.”

“An editor?” said Todd. He felt the cold hand of terror on his throat.

“There are moments in the book which we feel could be usefully trimmed,” said Nora, efficient now. “It’s a marvelous book but we tend to find as publishers that every new manuscript benefits from a fresh eye. An eye ready to make cuts, and changes.”

“I thought you said you liked it,” he said.

“Oh, we do,” Carrie hastened. “We love it. But—”

“We’re not talking swingeing cuts,” Nora butted in. “Just a few trims here and there. It’s a big book and we like it that way. Also,” she beamed, “There are sections we feel could be lengthened. For clarification.”

“Some moments are obscure,” agreed Carrie. “Which is charming, but in the current climate, we don’t want to be obfuscatory.”

“You do see what we mean,” said Nora.

Todd was silent. His mind was racing. I’m not editing this fucking book, he thought. I wouldn’t know where to start. Or stop.

He imagined himself in a butcher’s apron, blindly slashing at the manuscript, with no idea if he was improving the novel or just hacking the life from it.

“I’m not sure,” he said finally.

Nora crushed a cigarette Todd hadn’t even noticed she’d been smoking.

“Todd,” she said. “I hate to come over—heavy—but this is the twentieth century. A publisher has a duty to the retailer as well as the reader. We have to make sure the product—awful word—is as near to perfect as we can make it. This is a world of markets, Todd, and publishing is as much a market as anywhere else.”

“No,” Todd said, almost regretfully, “I get all that, I really do. But it’s not that I don’t want to change the book. It’s that I can’t.”

And by can’t, he thought, I really do mean can’t.

Now Nora looked impatient.

“Not allowing an editor to work on your book is the kind of privilege we’d afford one of our long-standing clients,” she said. “Someone who’d been with us for a number of years, someone who was selling decent amounts of books over a long period of time.”

“And even then,” said Carrie, “we’d have to be very, very careful. Authors are not always the best judges of their own work.”

“Short version, everyone gets edited,” Nora said. “Everyone.”

“I feel like I’m being ganged up on,” said Todd, laughing nervously.