“How are things shaping up for the launch?”

“Brilliantly.” I take out my phone to show her the photo I’d taken earlier for Alix. This picture is worth a thousand of the words I’m too nervous now to say.

“I wish I could make it,” Sue says.

“We’ll splash the launch all over social media. It’ll be like you were there.”

Sue smiles cryptically at the image going black on my cell phone before looking directly at me. The smile fades.

“Listen, Lanie,” she begins, “what I’m about to say isn’t going to be easy for you.”

I hold my breath, gripping my armrests. If she fires me, I honestly don’t know what I’ll do. Ryan tells me all the time how many jobs there are out there that I’d be great at, but that’s because he wants me to move to D.C. I don’t want another job. I want this one.

Sue opens a folder on her lap, flips through a few pages. Torturing me.

“Shoot. It’s not here.” She rises and goes to the door, sounding slightly piqued. “Frank? The document?”

There’s scuffling outside and Frank’s apologetic murmurs. While Sue waits at the door, I look away, as from a surgeon about to amputate one of my limbs. I face her oversized windows and watch the snow falling on the café awning across the street.

And of course, this is the view I’d have while getting fired. That café is the place where I got this job, seven years ago.

I was twenty-two, just out of college, and wildly optimistic. The week before graduation I had come across a job posting online:

Editorial Assistant, Peony Press.

By then, I was an English minor, but for all intents and purposes, still pre-med. In an instant, my plans to move home and spend the summer studying for the MCAT? Poof. Gone. This was a sign. I was never meant to be a doctor. I was on this earth to bring more stories like Ninety-Nine Things into the world.

I took a Greyhound up to New York. I slept on friends’ parents’ couches in various boroughs, and waitressed at a Greek diner while I waited for Peony Press to call.

They didn’t. Nor did any of the other publishers where I applied for jobs.

By September, my couch prospects and my dad’s patience ran out in the form of a plane ticket home. The day before my flight back to Atlanta, a visitor arrived in Queens. I stood on my friend Ravi’s mom’s fire escape, squinting into hazy sun at what appeared to be my grandmother.