Finnegan raised his palms. “All I’m saying is, a lot rides on your decision. You’ve sold nearly fifteen million books and have an ever-growing fan base. One generation gets followed by another and then another. Those Sandra Boynton board books never go out of print. Look at Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. Came out in the eighties, continues to sell a shitload every year, and still will long after we’re dead and gone.”

He inwardly winced at his choice of words. Not the kind of phrase you wanted to use with someone who’d had the kind of year Annie Blunt had had. If she’d taken offense at his language, she did not show it.

Finnegan pushed on. “You’re in that league. Your books are timeless. There’s no reason people will stop buying them.”

“They’ll have to be content with the backlist,” she said. “There just won’t be any new ones.”

The next Pierce the Penguin book was in the spring catalogue. The division’s entire budget had been built around it. But Annie had not delivered, hadn’t so much as sketched out a single page. To be out by May, the book would already have to be in-house.

Finnegan leaned back in his chair and took in the room around him. “This was where we had our first meeting, when I acquired Pierce Goes to Paris. Nine years ago.”

The Gramercy Tavern was barely a thirty-minute walk from Annie’s place on Bank Street in the West Village. More convenient for her than for Finnegan, whose Langley House Books office was way up Broadway near 60th. Langley, a division of one of the biggest publishing conglomerates in the world, had the better part of the twenty-third floor.

Annie wasn’t about to admit her editor might be right about going mad in some small town. She’d never lived anywhere but New York, unless you counted that month she’d spent in Paris when she was twenty, doing the whole becoming-an-artist thing. She’d grown up in Brooklyn, had first lived on her own in a dingy apartment not far from the Guggenheim, then a slightly less rat-infested place in SoHo while she attended the School of Visual Arts on 23rd Street in Manhattan where, in an animation class, she met John.

John.

Fellow nerd, best friend, around-the-clock support system, love of her life.

When unimaginable success hit, she and John and, before long, Charlie, moved into their Bank Street brownstone. John Lennon and Yoko had lived on that street once. Sid Vicious even died there. Talk about a neighborhood with character.

Yeah, New York was in her blood, its taxi fumes in her lungs, even if more of them were going electric. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of change.