After the smokers returned, I didn’t go back to the meeting; I set off down the hall that ran around the entire floor of this glass building, set like a jewel in the garden. I turned right, to the Italian fiction section; I sat down at my desk, one of five lined up like school desks in the waiting room between the hall and the offices of the senior editors and the editor in chief. Each area had been designed with panels at about eye-level, and reinforced with bookshelves: the office hadn’t been reconfigured yet since the layoffs.

A man in front of me bent over a manuscript, head propped up on one hand, elbow on his knee, feet on a box of A4 paper. He was wearing earplugs. He’d been an editorial director and a publisher, and now was back to reading manuscripts, untroubled, not even going to meetings. He was bald, tall but not gangly; his neck was thick and tanned as hide, much darker than the beige jacket he wore. His neck was saying something to me—that there’d come a time when I’d give the same impression of strength and mortality.

No one came looking for me; I went back to the meeting. They were waiting to start, gossiping about an author and his literary jealousies: I joined in on the laughter. Everyone (or almost everyone) at that table was a published poet or novelist, and we all recognized the need for glory. I’m a poet, but I wasn’t writing anymore and hadn’t published in years. The editor in chief was a writer.

He began assigning books again, and one novel I admired went to Eleonora, even though I’d discovered the author and edited his previous book. Now sitting, rigid, I started to flush, and I asked myself what was going on. For three years, Eleonora’s talent had been my privilege to oversee: she answered to me, got her assignments from me. She’d work with the text, while I’d work on the author’s career, taking him to lunch when he was immersed in his book or suffering from writer’s block, submitting the book to prizes, introducing him to other writers who might get him more exposure or help him grow. I wouldn’t say I’d exploited Eleonora and her self-sacrificial tendency—because I also made sure my colleagues and the editor in chief knew right away how talented she was, that we’d taken on a thoroughbred—but even knowing she’d be free one day, I wasn’t prepared for this pain, this blind jealousy.