“You and Em should be writing to each other—I’ll guess that Em is waiting for you to write her first,” Mr. Barlow wrote me back. This was four or five weeks before I went to Aspen; Grace was starting her seventh month. The snowshoer said Em and Grace had been writing each other for a year. On the New Year’s Eve when I met Grace, it was Grace who took Em’s grocery list with her when Molly drove my mom and her home. The snowshoer assured me that Grace had not imposed herself on Em, as an editor; Grace was offering to be an early reader of Em’s novel, not presuming she would be Em’s publisher. What Grace did presume, Mr. Barlow wrote, was that this would be a more commercial and accessible work of fiction for Emily MacPherson. Despite the third-person omniscient voice—as deadpan and detached as Em could make it—the novel was based on Em and Nora’s life together, onstage and off, and on the Gallows Lounge shooting. Grace had advised Em against Two Dykes, One Who Talks as a title. I’d known Grace for only one year, but I knew how freely she gave advice. Was this why Em told me not to let Grace be my editor? I asked Elliot.

Mr. Barlow repeated what Em had told me—Grace was a very good editor. Elliot and Em were worried that my having Grace as an editor could be a strain on our marriage. “It might be too much Grace,” was all the snowshoer said about it. I was surprised to learn Em had decided Grace would be her publisher—not surprised to hear Em would stick with the snowshoer as her editor and her copy editor. I’d known Grace for only one year, but I knew there was such a thing as too much Grace—as the snowshoer put it. “You should write Em—you should talk to Grace,” the little English teacher told me. In the month before I left for Aspen, I could have written Em. I didn’t; I was waiting for her to write me first.