I was up all night debating whether I should say what I’m about to say. But if I hadn’t canceled my D.C. weekend with Ryan to meet with Noa Callaway, then I wouldn’t have gotten to see BD at all. So in a way, it feels like it was meant to be that my grandmother is here when I need her most.

“You joke, but—” I say.

“I joke, but I’m dead serious. In the way only an octogenarian can be. You can trust me with your confidence, Elaine.”

“Thank you.” My eyes fill with tears.

BD scoots her chair around the table to be nearer to me. She holds my hands. Hers are always cold and smooth, and she wears about eighteen thousand very nice rings.

“Honey. Is it Ryan?”

“What? No. Everything’s fine with Ryan,” I say. “It’s . . . Noa Callaway. I met Noa Callaway.”

I swallow and meet my grandmother’s wide eyes. BD has been a fan of Noa’s almost as long as I have, ever since I bought her Ninety-Nine Things a decade ago in large print.

“She’s a he,” I say and hang my head. “A man. And not the good kind.”

“Well, that’s a third-degree doozy.” BD tosses her napkin on the table, as if she’s just lost her appetite.

I, on the other hand, have started stress-eating. I grab a huge wedge of injera and sweep up a mound of spicy chicken doro wat.

“Okay, where do we begin?” she says.

“We could begin with the fact that the whole reason I got into publishing is because of Noa Callaway, and it turns out she’s a lie,” I say with my mouth full. “Now I’m an accomplice, and Peony is profiting off the misconception that our biggest author is a woman.”

“Go back, go back.” BD waves her hand. “Let’s work our way up to moral depravity—”

“But morally, I am violating the trust of millions of readers! Can I even call myself a feminist?”

My grandmother pats my arm. “I don’t think Gloria Steinem is coming to take your card away just yet,” she says, then pauses to think. “Another way of looking at what happened is the classic you-met-your-hero, Lanie. Why don’t you slow down and tell me about it?”

“Ugh,” I say, as the memory flows back into my mind. “His real name is Noah Ross. He’s a mid-thirties narcissist with a smug smile and a completely reckless disregard for the fact that he’s four months late on his next manuscript. He doesn’t seem to grasp that even if it doesn’t matter to him whether he writes another book, it matters to a whole lot of other people. It matters to me.”

“What makes you so sure he’s not working on this book?”