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.

This morning, I’d sent Noa a link to the cake balloons for her launch, and she’d responded with a GIF of a woman being lifted off into the Manhattan skyline by a vast bouquet of balloons.

Let me know what time you’ll be passing by. I’ll wave you onward from my window. Wonder where you’ll land. . . .

I know Noa lives at 800 Fifth Avenue, and I am guilty of having scoped out the building while jogging once or twice. I can see her there, at her luxury window, a pair of binoculars pressed to her eyes. I like to picture her looking something like a young Anjelica Huston.

Noa’s working title for this next book is Thirty-Eight Obituaries—we’ll have to change that, but the premise is great. It’s going to be about a young journalist who lands her first job at her dream newspaper, only to find it’s in the obituary department. The hook, as Alix pitched it to me, is that the protagonist’s first assignment is to prepare the obituary for a young, hard-living enfant-terrible sculptor. In case he dies doing one of his increasingly dangerous artistic stunts, they’ll have the obit ready to go. Cue the unexpected love story.

It’s so on-brand Noa Callaway that it seems like it should write itself. So what is going on with Noa that she can’t finish it?

I suddenly wonder whether Alix knew something was wrong with this next book. It was due before she went on maternity leave. Was part of her decision not to come back . . . her anticipation of a Noa Callaway catastrophe?

“When Alix left on maternity leave,” Sue says, “she told me she had faith in you, Lanie. I can understand that during her absence, you’ve been in a holding pattern with Noa. But now—”

I meet Sue’s eyes because this feels like the moment she’s going to lower the boom. I think of my favorite Noa Callaway line, from her third novel, Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad:

Life’s greatest mystery is whether we shall die bravely.

If my career is about to die, I’d like to meet its end bravely. But I don’t feel brave. I feel terrified, like I’m losing my balance at the end of a plank.

“I need you,” Sue says, “to take over.”

“Take over,” I say slowly. “Noa Callaway?”