Ambition is an iceberg submerged in a sea of solitude from adolescence—even childhood—on. Dating back to high school, Eleonora’s iceberg had been submerged underwater, and I couldn’t take credit for its surfacing, it had just floated my way: I’d been the first person in the publishing industry who wasn’t in awe of her beauty, who treated her confidently. Maybe it helped that she’d been so thin, and not a noir sort of thin: she had the wide hips of someone built to be slightly heavy, she was a Botticelli-esque Venus on trim legs, almost always wearing running shoes, with a face—people might say she had a “creamy” complexion, but I thought she had a face more like shortbread, full of sugar and flour and raisin-moles and freckles. The first years we knew each other, I’d look at her as little as possible. If I stopped to examine her, I discovered irresistible details, like her lazy eye: her left eyelid was only half open from reading too much and keeping her nose in a book, in bed, on couches, and on buses, never relaxing, never finding a healthy position to read in (if those exist).

I haven’t really expressed how pretty she was before, because it didn’t have anything to do with her career, no matter what I thought that day in the office when I suspected she’d decided so coolly to fall in love with the editor in chief.

Writing this, I can feel that old knot in my throat that I used to get when I traveled up to Milan in the weeks before we’d become lovers and I felt the pleasure, not yet contaminated by sex, of having discovered a treasure hidden in plain sight, where no one thought to stoop and pick it up, at a creative writing workshop in Rome, where for a year and a half, no one had figured out how smart she was, maybe because she hadn’t joined the chorus of praise for the four or five hot authors at the time; the pleasure of knowing that weekly, whenever the professional need arose, I could see her.

The downpour had slowed to a drizzle. The sun beat down on the building, but the panels dividing the hallway blocked out the glory of the clearing sky; the fluorescent lights running along the ceiling, over every cubicle and room, overwhelmed the grainy light of that summer afternoon. I was watching this play of natural and artificial light when the editor in chief asked me, for the first time, if I wanted to handle the covers in Varia—that miscellany category of cookbooks, coaches’ biographies, etc.—since the editor was out on maternity leave.