Poppy blows her gleaming black, meticulously styled Bettie Page fringe out of her eyes. My press officer and marketing director is a practicing rockabilly girl with a bit of the pinup about her. Today she’s wearing a black dress with white polka dots and a red hem over seamed stockings and patent-leather Mary Jane shoes.

“Poppy, let me introduce Sam. Sam, this is Poppy. Sam’s into speculative fiction.”

“Oh, that’s lucky. It’s the only genre I like,” says my secret weapon, stretching out a delicate white hand in fingerless black lace gloves.

I don’t tell Sam that Poppy can do anything. She can spoil authors and take care of PR, have the press eating out of the palm of her hand, and compose amazing tweets even after seven Hendrick’s gin and tonics. I’ve known her for as long as I’ve run Realitycrash, which is to say twenty years, and we both love alternative realities, as do Ralph, the graphic designer, and Andrea, my chief editor.

Poppy is famous in the industry for the tattoo on her back. It depicts an open book in which she collects her favorite quotes by asking an artist to inscribe them in ink under her skin. Some authors would rather be immortalized on Poppy’s skin than win the Man Booker Prize.

She hands me a printout. We’re publishing a special tenth-anniversary edition of Thousand Doors.

“What’s it about?” Sam asks.

“It’s a multiworld scenario,” Andrea replies, having also left her corner with the Plexiglas-boxed manuscripts. “One day an anxious young criminal barrister discovers a door in his office that he’s never seen before. He steps through it and finds himself back in his office, only the parameters of his life have shifted ever so slightly. He has—”

“A fling with his boss’s wife,” Ralph completes the sentence after noticing the gathering by the trophy cabinet. “One hell of a moody diva, but what can you do?”

“He escapes, but doesn’t notice that he’s left through the hidden door of the second office,” Andrea explains, taking up the story again.

“And as he searches for the ‘best’ possible life, he becomes hopelessly confused by the thousand doors and the many thousands of different ways of living one’s life,” Poppy concludes.

What I haven’t revealed to Sam is that this was the unedited manuscript I read to my dead father over ten years ago as I kept my vigil beside his corpse. I know it practically by heart, and every time I see it I think of the silence in that room and of how empty life seemed without him. I think it took me four years to learn to laugh again without bursting into tears.

“What do you think of the cover?” I ask Sam.