“Is that them?” Ryan points at an elderly pair approaching on the path.

I rise on my toes, follow his gaze, optimistic.

“No.” I shake my head. Not even close.

It’s been years since I’ve been in Central Park on a Saturday at dusk. Probably since I started dating Ryan. A cold feeling of futility settles over me as I consider that one or both parties of my couples crush might not still be alive.

Ryan puts his arms around me. I think he can tell I’m disappointed. We’re about to kiss when thunder claps and the sky cracks open with rain. I want to linger, to ignore the storm and our dinner plans, to stay here kissing until Edward and Elizabeth appear. They never let the weather stop them. I’ve seen them picnic with a battery-powered heat lamp in a snowstorm.

But Ryan takes off his coat and drapes it over my head. He tugs on my hand.

“We’d better make a run for it or we’ll never get a cab,” he shouts over the downpour.

He’s right, I know, but leaving like this, before I see Edward and Elizabeth, feels every kind of wrong.

Chapter Six

On my first day at Peony, I walked in on Alix smoking weed behind her desk.

“I am so sorry!” I’d cried, backing away and vowing to knock louder next time, wondering if I should leave the cover materials I’d come to drop off—or abort the mission entirely.

“Come in, come in,” she told me, coughing as she sprayed fig-scented diffuser. “I don’t usually do this, but I have a call with Callaway this morning.”

Noa had just turned in the first draft of her third novel, Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad. I’d devoured the manuscript—and pored over Alix’s eighteen-page, single-spaced editorial letter like an archeologist examining the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The book centers on a couple in their twenties who plan a romantic getaway to New York . . . only to have it crashed by his mom and her dad. Things get worse when the young couple discovers that not only did their parents used to date, both are single again. Much to their children’s despair, the old flame hasn’t gone out. So the younger couple hatches a plan to turn their parents off each other through a series of schemes masked as vacation adventures. A culinary competition, tickets to Broadway, kayaking on the Hudson, etc. But every moment of the young couple’s trip only brings their parents closer.

The hang-gliding scene in the second half contains a line that’s long stayed with me. Just before they run off the cliff, the main character’s mother says:

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