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“I think I need to get out of the city for a while,” Annie Blunt said, taking a long sip of her cocktail.

“Like, what, a vacation?” asked Finnegan Sproule, glancing about for a waiter. He could see that Annie was nearly ready for

another drink.

Annie shook her head, her long, frizzy, weeping-willow hair swaying across her shoulders. “A change of scene. A month, two

months, maybe. Part of the summer, for sure. I’d pack us up and go today, but I don’t want to pull Charlie out of school before

the end of the year. Someplace out in the country. A small town, I don’t know.”

“But you’d come back, in September.”

She shrugged. “We find someplace we like, we could stay there.”

“You’ve always lived in New York.” Finnegan smiled. “You’ll go nuts in a small town. Where will you get bagels?”

“We’ll eat Wonder Bread. It’s wonderful with peanut butter. There’s a world beyond Manhattan, you know.”

Finnegan appeared thoughtful. “Actually, I’m not sure there is. Sure, it can get so hot in the summer your shoes stick to

the pavement. But come fall, when the leaves in Central Park start to change?”

“A reporter was waiting for me when I came out of my building this morning.”

He frowned. “Shit.”

“Said she was from Vanity Fair . She’d emailed me a few times and I hadn’t answered, so she decided on the personal ambush. Wanted to know if there’d ever be another book.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her fuck off, that’s what I told her.”

“There’ve been some stories in the trades, speculating,” Finnegan said.

“Let them speculate. It’s nobody’s business.”

“Well,” he said hesitantly, “that’s not exactly true.”

Annie gave him a look. “I know. I owe you one more book.”

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. 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.

Picking up on Finnegan’s observation that they were back where it all began, she said, “And I probably don’t look much different

than I did that day.” She half raised her arms, showing off her shapeless knit sweater. She glanced down. “These might be

the same jeans.”

“It’s one of your charms. You’ve never let success go to your head. You almost bailed on the Newbery Awards because you didn’t want to get glammed up. I almost wish you had skipped it. I could have accepted the award on your behalf.”

“John talked me into it,” she said, smiling sadly at the memory. “When I came out of the bedroom in that Dior gown he asked

who I was and what I’d done with his wife.”

Her eyes wandered the room.

“You’re not liking the halibut?” Finnegan asked. He pointed to the mostly untouched piece of fish on her plate. “Send it back.

Get something else.”

“It’s fine.”

“Really. You were going to get the chicken. Send it back and get the chicken.”

“I don’t want the chicken. But I wouldn’t say no to another one of these Garden Gimlets.”

She indicated her cocktail glass. She’d already had two. Finnegan waved a hand in the air, caught the eye of a waiter, pointed

to Annie’s empty glass, and nodded. The waiter nodded in return. Message received.

“There are two women at that table over there who’ve been looking this way,” she said. “Christ, don’t turn around.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Annie said. “People sneaking glances, whispering. Even Charlie’s dealing with it at school.

Kids teasing. Asking him if he’s taking flying lessons.”

Finnegan grimaced.

“I’m no A-list celeb,” Annie conceded. “Not even C-list. But I do get recognized occasionally. I want to go where no one knows

me.”

“So take a break. Three months, six. A year. Whatever. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here. No pressure.”

“I can pay back the advance for the next one.”

His palms went up again. “There’s no need for talk like that.”

The waiter arrived with her cocktail, took the empty glass away. Rather than pick it up and have a sip, she simply stared at it.

“I see him every night,” she whispered.

Finnegan waited.

“I’m afraid to go to sleep because he always visits me.”

“John,” Finnegan said.

Annie bit her lower lip. “Him, too. But I welcome those visits.”

Stupid me , Finnegan thought. Of course she was talking about Evan.

“Every time, I try to talk him back inside. He’s on the ledge and I’m doing everything I can to persuade him that his goddamn

cardboard wings won’t hold him aloft. He won’t listen. He looks so happy.”

Annie’s eyes misted. She looked away again, trying to hold it together. She picked up her drink and took a sip, felt its warmth

work its way through her body.

“I know you’ve heard this a hundred times, but it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “No more than if some kid thought he was Superman.

Did you know there were actually incidents related to Peter Pan? When it was first published, kids got hurt trying to fly,

jumping off their beds and worse. Originally, J. M. Barrie had Peter and the Lost Boys flying without any kind of help, but

when he heard about kids injuring themselves, he amended the story, that you could only fly if you had pixie dust blown on

you. Trying to make the point that the flying was magical, that regular kids couldn’t do it.”

She still couldn’t look at him as he continued.

“Look, we’ve reached this point where you can’t do anything without legal stepping in and saying, well, that warrants some

sort of caution. You want to reprint Goldilocks and the Three Bears ? Maybe we need a disclaimer, that in the real world bears should not be approached because they can be very dangerous. If creative people hold back because there’s one chance in a million someone will interpret their work in a totally irrational way, what will we end up with?”

Annie slowly fixed her eyes on her editor. “He wasn’t some nut with a gun who went on a rampage because of social media. He

was six, Finnegan. He was six years old.”

“And where were his parents? Why hadn’t they explained that not everything in a book is real? That just because a penguin

in a book can learn to fly, it doesn’t mean a kid can jump out an apartment building? Why’d they leave that balcony door unlocked?

Who was supervising? Annie, you can’t beat yourself up forever.”

“You sound like John,” Annie said faintly. “He said all the same things. I feel like... I can’t shake the idea that what

happened to John was some kind of karma. The universe trying to even the score.”

“Annie.”

“I killed that boy, and then someone killed John.” She forced a sardonic smile. “Maybe I should let it go. My punishment has

been meted out. The gods have spoken.”

Finnegan couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He scanned the room again for the waiter, wondering whether he should

just ask for the check, if they should get out of here.

“Oh shit,” Annie said.

“What?”

“ of them’s coming over here.”

A slender woman, late thirties, early forties, looking like she’d walked off the page of an Ann Taylor catalogue, approached,

looking apologetic.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling awkwardly. “I don’t do usually do this. I really don’t. I was here one day and Al Pacino was sitting at that table and I was dying to say hello but I didn’t, but you’re Annie Blunt and I just had to tell you how much our family has enjoyed your books.”

Annie forced a smile onto her lips. “That’s kind of you to say.”

“We got your books when our daughter was little and read them to her every night and even though she’s older now we always

get the new one and she has them all on the shelf in her room. I so wish I had one of them with me that you could sign for

her. Her name is Emily.”

Annie continued to smile but said nothing, thinking that maybe if she didn’t speak, the woman would go away.

“We think Pierce would make a great animated series. Do you think they’ll ever do something like that?”

Finnegan stepped in. “There have been offers, of course, but, and I think I can speak for Ms. Blunt here, we think Pierce

works best on the page and in the reader’s imagination. But rest assured, you’re not the only one who’s mentioned it.”

“Well, anyway, that’s all I wanted to say,” the woman said. “Enjoy your lunch!”

Annie heaved a quiet sigh of relief as their visitor returned to her table.

“Thank you,” she said quietly to her editor. “I’m just not up—”

The woman had stopped, as if forgetting something. She turned and came back to the table, looking directly at Annie.

“I just wanted to add—I didn’t know whether to bring it up a moment ago—but I just have to say that, of all your books, our

favorite has to be Pierce Takes Flight . It’s simply wonderful, and I’m here to tell you, our Emily was certainly smart enough not to go jumping off a balcony.” She smiled broadly. “You have a wonderful day.”