“Meg, when’s the last time you breathed?” I ask. “Do you need to push your button?”

“How can you manage to sound pervy and like my mother? Okay, okay, I’m pushing my button.”

It’s a trick her therapist taught her, an imaginary elevator button Meg can press in the hollow of her throat to carry herself down a few levels. I picture her in her all-black ensemble and stylishly giant glasses, standing in the center of the hotel ballroom downtown with assistants buzzing all around, hurrying to transform the modernist SoHo event space into a quaint destination wedding on the Amalfi Coast. I see her closing her eyes and touching the hollow of her throat. She exhales into the phone.

“I think it worked,” she says.

I smile. “I’ll track down the books. Anything else before I head over?”

“Not unless you play the harp,” Meg moans.

“What happened to the harpist?”

We’d paid a premium to hire the principal from the New York Phil to pluck Pachelbel’s Canon as guests arrive tonight.

“The flu happened,” Meg says. “She offered to send her friend who plays the oboe, but that doesn’t exactly scream Italian wedding . . . does it?”

“No oboe,” I say, my pulse quickening.

These are just problems. As with the first draft of a book, there’s always a solution. We just have to find it and make the revision. I’m good at this. It’s my job as senior editor.

“I made a playlist when I was editing the book,” I offer to Meg. “Dusty Springfield. Etta James. Billie Eilish.”

“Bless you. I’ll have someone copy it when you get down here. You’ll need your phone for your speech, right?”

A flutter of nerves spreads through my chest. Tonight is the first time I’ll be taking the stage before an audience at a Noa Callaway launch. Usually, my boss makes the speeches, but Alix is on maternity leave, so the spotlight will be on me.

“Lanie, I gotta go,” Meg says, a new burst of panic in her voice. “Apparently we’re also missing two hundred dollars’ worth of cake balloons. And now they’re saying, because it’s Valentine’s goddamned eve, they’re too busy to make any more—”

The line goes dead.

In the hours before a big Noa Callaway event, we sometimes forget that we’re not performing an emergency appendectomy.

I think this is because, well, the first rule of a Noa Callaway book launch is . . . Noa Callaway won’t be there.