Cover

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
By Any Other Name

“Reading Lauren Kate’s By Any Other Name is like watching a Nora Ephron movie. It makes the day seem brighter, the world seem more hopeful, and happiness seem possible for everyone. This book is a buoyant celebration of love.”

—Jill Santopolo, author of The Light We Lost and More Than Words

“I devoured this book in one sitting. Delightful, optimistic, and with a perfect dash of bookishness, By Any Other Name is the rom-com the world needs right now.”

—Julie Buxbaum, author of Tell Me Three Things

“A smart imaginative rom-com that had me turning the pages.”

—Abby Jimenez, author of Life’s Too Short

“A behind-the-scenes look at publishing that feels both realistic and totally fun—I wish I could read Noa Callaway’s books in real life! It’s a joy to watch Lanie get the courage to go after what she wants, and the supporting characters (like her hilarious best friends and her irreverent grandmother) leap off the page. An incredibly romantic love story that’s full of surprises, By Any Other Name is perfect for anyone who dreams of happily-ever-afters.”

—Kerry Winfrey, author of Waiting for Tom Hanks

“By Any Other Name is a beautiful, emotional, slow-burn love story with an ending that will leave you with the biggest smile. Lauren Kate shows she can write heartfelt contemporary romance just as deftly as every other genre she’s mastered.”

—Sarah Smith, author of Faker

“By Any Other Name is impossible to put down or to forget. A sharp, moving, and hilarious love story, it feels like being in the company of a close friend.”

—Maria Kuznetsova, author of Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable

Novels by Lauren Kate

The Orphan’s Song

Young Adult Novels by Lauren Kate

TEARDROP SERIES

Waterfall

Teardrop

FALLEN SERIES

Unforgiven

Rapture

Fallen: Angels in the Dark

Fallen in Love

Passion

Torment

Fallen

The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove

Dedication

For Elizabeth Nusbaum Epstein, my BD

Epigraph

Those you love come at you like lightning

—Dorianne Laux, “To Kiss Frank . . .”

Chapter One

“Peony Press, this is Lanie Bloom—” I say, barely getting the phone to my ear before the voice on the other end cuts me off.

“Hallelujah-you’re-still-at-your-desk!”

It’s Meg, our senior publicist, and my closest friend at work. She’s calling from the Hotel Shivani, where, four hours from now, we’ll be hosting a blowout wedding-themed book launch for Noa Callaway—our biggest author and the writer who taught me about love when my mom couldn’t. Noa Callaway’s books changed my life.

If experience is any guide, we’re just slightly overdue for all our best-laid plans to go up in flames.

“No sign of the signed books. And no fucking pun intended. Can you see if they were sent to the office by mistake,” Meg says, a mile a minute. “I need time to arrange them into a five-tiered, heart-shaped wedding cake—”

See? Best-laid plans.

“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.

Noa Callaway is our powerhouse author, with forty million books in print around the world. She is also the rare publishing phenomenon who doesn’t do publicity. You can’t google Noa’s author photo nor contact her online. You’ll never read a T magazine piece about the antique telescope in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. She declines all invitations for champagne whenever her books hit the list, though she lives 3.4 miles from our office. In fact, the only soul I know who’s actually met Noa Callaway is my boss, Noa’s editor, Alix de Rue.

And yet, you know Noa Callaway. You’ve seen her window displays in airports. Your aunt’s book club is reading her right now. Even if you’re the type who prefers The Times Literary Supplement over The New York Times Book Review, at the very least, you’ve Netflix and chilled Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad. (That’s Noa’s third novel but first movie adaptation, meme-famous for that scene with the turkey baster.) Over the past ten years, Noa Callaway’s heart-opening love stories have become so culturally pervasive that if they haven’t made you laugh, and cry, and feel less alone in a cruel and oblivious world, then you should probably check to see whether you’re dead inside.

With no public face behind Noa Callaway’s name, those of us in the business of publishing her novels feel a special pressure to go the extra mile. It makes us do crazy things. Like drop two grand on helium balloons filled with floating angel food cake.

Meg assured me that when our guests pop these balloons at the end of my toast this evening, the shower of cake and edible confetti will be worth every penny that came out of my group’s budget.

Assuming they haven’t gone missing.

“Zany Lanie.” Joe from our mailroom pops his head inside my office and gives me an air fist bump.

“Joe, my bro,” I quip back automatically, as I’ve been doing every day for the past seven years. “Hey, perfect timing—have you seen four big boxes of signed books arrive from Noa Callaway’s office?”

“Sorry.” He shakes his head. “Just this for you.”

As Joe sets down a stack of mail on my desk, I fire off a diplomatic text to Noa Callaway’s longtime assistant, and my occasional nemesis, Terry.

Terry is seventy, steel-haired, tanklike, and ever ready to shut down any request that might interfere with Noa’s process. Meg and I call her the Terrier because she barks but rarely bites. It’s always iffy whether simple things—like getting Noa to sign a couple hundred books for an event—will actually get done.

It will be a travesty if our guests go home tonight without a copy of Noa’s new book. I can feel them out there, two hundred and sixty-six Noa Callaway fans, all along the Northeast Corridor, from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. They are taking off work two hours early, confirming babysitters, venmoing dog walkers. They are dropboxing Monday’s presentation and rummaging through drawers for unripped tights while toddlers cling to their legs. In a dozen different ways, these intrepid ladies are getting shit done so they can take a night for themselves. So they can train to the Hotel Shivani and be among the first to get their hands on Two Hundred and Sixty-Six Vows.

I think it’s Noa’s best book yet.

The story takes place at a destination wedding over Valentine’s Day weekend. On a whim, the bride invites the full wedding party to stand up and renew their own vows—to a spouse, to a friend, to a pet, to the universe . . . with disastrous results. It’s moving and funny, meta and of-the-moment, the way Noa’s books always are.

The fact that the novel ends with a steamy scene on a Positano beach is just one more reason I know Noa Callaway and I are psychically connected. Family legend has it that my mother was conceived on a beach in Positano, and while that might not seem like information most kids would cherish knowing, I was raised in part by my grandmother, who defines the term sex-positive.

I’ve always wanted to visit Positano. Vows makes me feel almost like I have.

I check my phone for a response from Terry about the signed books. Nothing. I can’t let Noa’s readers down tonight. Especially because Two Hundred and Sixty-Six Vows may be the last Noa Callaway book they get to read for a while. . . .

Our biggest author is four months late delivering her next manuscript. Four unprecedented months late.

After a decade of delivering a book each year, the prolific Noa Callaway suddenly seems to have no plans of turning in her next draft. My attempts to get past Terry and connect with Noa have been fruitless. It’s only a matter of time before our production department expects me to turn over a tightly edited—and nonexistent—manuscript.

But that’s a panic attack for another day. Alix is due back from maternity leave next week, and the pressure will be on.

I’m flipping through my mail, waiting impatiently for Terry’s response, knowing I need to get down to the venue—when my hands find a little brown box in the middle of the mail Joe delivered. It’s no bigger than a deck of cards. My distracted mind recognizes the return address and I gasp.

It’s the Valentine’s gift I had handmade for my fiancé, Ryan. I unwrap the paper, slide open the box, and smile.

The polished wood square is pale and smooth, about the size and thickness of a credit card. It unfolds like an accordion, revealing three panels. In fine calligraphy is The List I made long ago. It’s all the attributes I wanted to find in the person I’d fall in love with. It’s my Ninety-Nine Things List, and Ryan checks off every one.

I’ve been told that most girls learn about love from their moms. But the summer I turned ten and my brother, David, was twelve, my mom was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She went fast, which everyone says is a mercy, but it isn’t. It just about killed my oncologist father that even he couldn’t save her.

My mom was a pharmacoepidemiologist on the board of the National Academy of Medicine. She used to fly all over the world, sharing stages with Melinda Gates and Tony Fauci, giving speeches on infectious diseases at the CDC and WHO. She was brilliant but also warm and funny. She could be tough, but she also knew how to make everyone feel special, seen.

She died on a Tuesday. It was raining out the hospital window, and her hand seemed smaller than mine. I held it as she razzed me for the last time.

“Just don’t be a dermatologist.”

(When you’re born into generations of doctors, you make jokes about imagined medical hierarchies.)

“I hear there’s good money in it,” I said. “And the hours.”

“Can’t beat the hours.” She smiled at me. Her eyes were the same blue as mine, everybody said. We used to have the same thick, straight brown hair, too, but in so many ways, my mom didn’t look like my mom anymore.

“Lanie?” Her voice had gone softer and yet more intense. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise to find someone you really, really love.”

My mother liked overachievers. And she seemed to be asking, with her final words, for me to overachieve in love. But how? When your mom dies and you are young, the worst part is that you know there’s all this stuff you’ll need to know, and now who’s going to teach you?

It wasn’t until college that I was introduced to the writer who would teach me about love: Noa Callaway.

One day after class, I came back to my dorm, and the tissues were flying on my roommate Dara’s side of the room where she and her friends were hunched together.

Dara held a half-eaten Toblerone out to me and waved a book in my direction. “Have you read this yet?”

I shook my head without glancing at the book, because Dara and I did not have the same reading tastes. I was pre-med like my brother and obsessing over my organic chemistry reader so I could move back to Atlanta and become a doctor like everyone else in my family. Dara was majoring in sociology, but her shelves were stuffed with paperbacks with cursive fonts.

“This book is the only thing that got Andrea over Todd,” she said.

I looked at Dara’s friend Andrea, who fell face-first into another girl’s lap.

“I’m crying because it’s so beautiful,” Andrea sobbed.

When Dara and her friends left in search of lattes, I felt the gold foil letters of the book’s title staring me down from across the room. I picked it up and held it in my hand.

Ninety-Nine Things I’m Going to Love About You by Noa Callaway.

I don’t know why, but the title made me think of my mother’s last words. Her plea that I find someone I really, really loved. Was she sending me a message over the transom?

I opened the book and started reading, and a funny thing happened: I couldn’t put it down.

Ninety-Nine Things is the story of Cara Kenna, a young woman struggling to survive a divorce. There’s a suicide attempt and a stint in a psych ward, but the tone is so brightly funny, I’d commit myself if it meant I could hang out with her.

In the hospital, Cara has only time to kill, and she does so by reading the ninety-nine romance novels in the psych ward library. At first, she’s cynical, but then, despite herself, she finds a line she likes. She writes it down. She says it aloud. Soon she’s writing down her favorite line from every book. By the day of her release, she has ninety-nine things to hope for in a future love affair.

I read the book in one sitting. I was buzzing all over. I looked at the chemistry homework I had to do and felt something inside me had changed.

Ninety-Nine Things held all the words I’d been looking for since my mother died. It spelled out how to really, really love. With humor, with heart, and with bravery. It made me want to find that love myself.

At the back of the book, where the author’s bio usually is, the publisher included three blank pages, lined and numbered from one to ninety-nine.

Okay, Mom, I’d thought, sitting down to get to work. I wasn’t sure which of Dara’s friends this book had belonged to, but it was now undeniably, cosmically mine.

The beauty of such a large list was that it allowed me to weave between weird and brave, between superficial and marrow-deep and deal-breaker serious. In between Enthusiastic about staying up all night discussing potential past lives and Answers the phone when his mother calls, I’d written: Doesn’t own clogs, unless he’s a chef or Dutch. At the very end, number ninety-nine, I wrote, Doesn’t die. I felt my mom was with me, between the lines of that list. I felt if I could pursue this kind of love, then she’d be proud of me, wherever she was.

I don’t know that I ever really thought I’d find a guy who embodied my whole list. It was more the exercise of committing to paper love’s wondrous possibilities.

But then . . . I met Ryan, and everything—well, all ninety-nine things—just clicked. He’s perfect for me. Scratch that. He’s perfect, period.

I fold up the wooden panels, tuck my gift back into the box. I can’t wait to give this to him tomorrow on Valentine’s Day.

My phone buzzes. A barrage of texts illuminates the screen. Two from Ryan, on his way up from D.C. He’s the legislative director for Virginia senator Marshall Ayers, and on alternate Fridays, their office closes early, so he takes the 1:13 train to New York.

The articles he’s texted—one review of a movie we both want to see, and one press piece for some legislation he’s been drafting about voters’ rights—are quickly shuffled to the bottom of my screen as my launch prep team blows me up.

The cake balloon crisis is still unfolding, and there are fifteen dramatic messages in the text thread to prove it. Two dozen balloons, at six dollars apiece, are missing from the order my assistant, Aude, picked up this morning. Calls to the bakery have been made. Refunds have been demanded.

At last, the message I’ve been waiting for appears. It’s Terry.

Stuck in traffic. Signed books in my possession. Stop freaking out.

I flip the bird at Terry’s patronizing message, but I also feel relief spread through my bones. I text Meg the good news, slide Ryan’s gift into my tote bag, and google the bakery to see whether I might stop in and solve Balloon-Gate on my way downtown.

Out my window, as the sun shimmies over the river, and it begins, very lightly, to snow, I feel a sense of calm. I love my fiancé. I love my job. Noa Callaway’s launches are celebrations of all that love put together. Tonight, two hundred and sixty-six women will go home happy with their new books. I think that my mom would be proud.

Everything’s going to be fine.

Chapter Two

Half an hour later, stepping out of the snow and into the warm and buttery bakery, I glimpse our balloons at the back.

At Dominique Ansel now, I chime in on the text thread. Reclaiming lost balloons!

On my phone, Meg dashes back:

Lanie, you really don’t have to do that.

I know this is less about the errand being below my pay grade and more about the fact that Meg suspects—not without reason—that I shouldn’t be trusted around objects so fragile. I have run through more computers and Kindles and photocopiers (yes, I actually slaughtered two photocopiers in my seven years at Peony) than the rest of the fourth floor combined. If you need someone to spill a big glass of water as soon as you sit down at an important agent lunch, I’m your gal. It’s a good thing I’m confident in my skills as an editor, because the whole publicity department still makes fun of the day I tried to help them mix a batch of sangria for a bookseller award celebration. The punch called for three cups of sugar, and I added salt. The containers looked the same. While people walked around gagging, I made matters worse by adding more salt. No one’s ever let me live it down.

But I’m here, and I have two hands and a good feeling about today. When my assistant, Aude, chimes in, texting crisp, clear instructions for the balloons, I know the team is strapped at the venue. They need me. It seals the deal.

Balloons under your name. Keep in protective plastic wrap until arrival on-site!!!! Please, Lanie. Inconvenience cost charged back to your card. Ask for Jerome.

Jerome is behind the counter, his name tag prominent on his starched white shirt. He’s reading Proust and looks less than enthused when I sidle up in front of him. I notice his tip jar is low.

“Hi, I’m Lanie Bloom. Here for the balloons.” I gesture behind him at the floating bouquet on the other side of the kitchen’s glass wall.

“No.” Back to his book Jerome goes. “Those are for someone else.”

“Aude Azaiz? She’s my assistant.”

Now Jerome looks up. “Ms. Azaiz works for you?” There’s shock in his voice, and honestly, I can’t blame him. With her boy-short black hair, silver skull nose piercing, and punctuating French Tunisian accent, Aude might be the world’s most intimidating twenty-three-year-old. Meg and I marvel at her outfits, the necklines of dresses that rise asymmetrically above her chin. We covet her rotation of leather jackets in surprising colors like marigold. When we order lunch to the office, Aude sends our food back for the slightest infraction—mayonnaise when she asked for aioli, improperly emulsified dressing, the wrong kind of crab in a California roll. Nobody fucks with her.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!