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.”