After the disaster of meeting Noah Ross, I knew I had to keep moving. I think more clearly when I’m not standing still, and there was no way I was going to sit idly by the rest of the evening, checking my email and waiting to see what he’d send.

I went home just long enough to hang up BD’s Fendi suit, feed Alice, and grab my running shoes.

Now, I appeal to the pavement of Manhattan, to the fading blue sky with its high cirrus clouds, to the lights coming on across the river and the steam rising out of subway grates and the pickle-scented air by the bodega, to the noise and the hustle and the mingle of eight million dreams—please, help me figure this one out.

How is the question looping through my mind for the first cold couple of miles. How does a guy like Noah Ross write women, write love so well?

At the launch, he had said he wasn’t married, no girlfriend, so I can’t credit a woman in the background. Then again, who knows if he was lying to me about being single, too.

Not that I care. I’m just genuinely confused. How did he convince me, surely one of his most careful readers, that there was a deep, true, feminine intuition behind his stories? How did his take on love come to be what shaped my own?

I cringe, thinking of my list. My Ninety-Nine Things. Tenderly crafted a decade ago on my dorm room bed.

When I picture cynical Noah Ross coming up with the premise of Ninety-Nine Things I’m Going to Love About You, I have to stop running because I think I might be sick. Seagulls scatter as I lean over the railing on East River Esplanade, gulping air to catch my breath. Wind lashes my face as the river rolls by beneath me, undisturbed.

And then, I wonder—

If I hadn’t taken that book so seriously, if I hadn’t committed my own list to paper, carried it around with me all these years . . . would I have fallen so hard and fast for Ryan when we met? Would I be as sure that he’s the one?

Stop it, I tell myself, and run west, away from the river. Just because Noa Calloway is a lie doesn’t mean my relationship is. It doesn’t mean love isn’t real and true.

This is not about Ryan. This is about my career.

And the man who might wreck it.

If I let him. Which I’m not going to do.

Usually, I’d be reaching out to my people about now. Ryan, first and foremost. And a half-second later, BD, then Rufus and Meg. But as my fingers itch to send a series of SOS texts to each of them, I see that non-disclosure agreement in my mind.