Chapter One“Peony Press, this is Lanie Bloom—” I say, barely getting the phone to my ear before the voice on the other end cuts me off.
“Hallelujah-you’re-still-at-your-desk!”
It’s Meg, our senior publicist, and my closest friend at work. She’s calling from the Hotel Shivani, where, four hours from now, we’ll be hosting a blowout wedding-themed book launch for Noa Callaway—our biggest author, and the writer who taught me about love when my mom couldn’t. Noa Callaway’s books changed my life.
If experience is any guide, we’re just slightly overdue for all our best laid plans to go up in flames.
“No sign of the signed books. And no fucking pun intended. Can you see if they were sent to the office by mistake,” Meg says, a mile a minute. “I need time to arrange them into a five-tiered, heart-shaped wedding cake—”
See? Best laid plans.
“Meg, when’s the last time you breathed?” I ask. “Do you need to push your button?”
“How can you manage to sound pervy
and like my mother? Okay, okay, I’m pushing my button.”
It’s a trick her therapist taught her, an imaginary elevator button Meg can press in the hollow of her throat to carry herself down a few levels. I picture her in her all-black ensemble and stylishly giant glasses, standing in the center of the hotel ballroom downtown with assistants buzzing all around, hurrying to transform the modernist SoHo event space into a quaint destination wedding on the Amalfi Coast. I see her closing her eyes and touching the hollow of her throat. She exhales into the phone.
“I think it worked,” she says.
I smile. “I’ll track down the books. Anything else before I head over?”
“Not unless you play the harp,” Meg moans.
“What happened to the harpist?”
We’d paid a premium to hire the principal from the New York Phil to pluck Pachelbel’s Canon as guests arrive tonight.
“The flu happened,” Meg says. “She offered to send her friend who plays the oboe, but that doesn’t exactly scream Italian wedding . . . does it?”
“No oboe,” I say, my pulse quickening.
These are just problems. As with the first draft of a book, there’s always a solution. We just have to find it and make the revision. I’m good at this. It’s my job as senior editor.
“I made a playlist when I was editing the book,” I offer to Meg. “Dusty Springfield. Etta James. Billie Eilish.”
“Bless you. I’ll have someone copy it when you get down here. You’ll need your phone for your speech, right?”
A flutter of nerves spreads through my chest. Tonight is the first time I’ll be taking the stage before an audience at a Noa Callaway launch. Usually, my boss makes the speeches, but Alix is on maternity leave, so the spotlight will be on me.
“Lanie, I gotta go,” Meg says, a new burst of panic in her voice. “Apparently we’re also missing two hundred dollars’ worth of cake balloons. And now they’re saying, because it’s Valentine’s goddamned eve, they’re too busy to make any more—”
The line goes dead.
In the hours before a big Noa Callaway event, we sometimes forget that we’re not performing an emergency appendectomy.
I think this is because, well, the first rule of a Noa Callaway book launch is . . . Noa Callaway won’t be there.
Noa Callaway is our powerhouse author, with forty million books in print around the world. She is also the rare publishing phenomenon who doesn’t do publicity. You can’t google Noa’s author photo nor contact her online. You’ll never read a
T Magazine piece about the antique telescope in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. She declines all invitations for champagne whenever her books hit the list, though she lives 3.4 miles from our office. In fact, the only soul I know who’s actually met Noa Callaway is my boss, Noa’s editor, Alix de Rue.
And yet, you know Noa Callaway. You’ve seen her window displays in airports. Your aunt’s book club is reading her right now. Even if you’re the type who prefers
The Times Literary Supplement over
The New York Times Book Review, at the very least, you’ve Netflix and chilled
Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad. (That’s Noa’s third novel but first movie adaptation, meme-famous for that scene with the turkey baster.) Over the past ten years, Noa Callaway’s heart-opening love stories have become so culturally pervasive that if they haven’t made you laugh, and cry, and feel less alone in a cruel and oblivious world, then you should probably check to see whether you’re dead inside.
With no public face behind Noa Callaway’s name, those of us in the business of publishing her novels feel a special pressure to go the extra mile. It makes us do crazy things. Like drop two grand on helium balloons filled with floating angel food cake.
Meg assured me that when our guests pop these balloons at the end of my toast this evening, the shower of cake and edible confetti will be worth every penny that came out of my group’s budget.
Assuming they haven’t gone missing.
“Zany Lanie.” Joe from our mailroom pops his head inside my office and gives me an air fist bump.
“Joe, my bro,” I quip back automatically, as I’ve been doing every day for the past seven years. “Hey, perfect timing—have you seen four big boxes of signed books arrive from Noa Callaway’s office?”
“Sorry.” He shakes his head. “Just this for you.”
As Joe sets down a stack of mail on my desk, I fire off a diplomatic text to Noa Callaway’s longtime assistant, and my occasional nemesis, Terry.
Terry is seventy, steel-haired, tanklike, and ever ready to shut down any request that might interfere with Noa’s process. Meg and I call her the Terrier because she barks but rarely bites. It’s always iffy whether simple things—like getting Noa to sign a couple hundred books for an event—will actually get done.
It will be a travesty if our guests go home tonight without a copy of Noa’s new book. I can feel them out there, two hundred and sixty-six Noa Callaway fans, all along the Northeast Corridor, from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. They are taking off work two hours early, confirming babysitters, venmoing dog walkers. They are dropboxing Monday’s presentation and rummaging through drawers for unripped tights while toddlers cling to their legs. In a dozen different ways, these intrepid ladies are getting shit done so they can take a night for themselves. So they can train to the Hotel Shivani and be among the first to get their hands on
Two Hundred and Sixty-Six Vows.
I think it’s Noa’s best book yet.
The story takes place at a destination wedding over Valentine’s Day weekend. On a whim, the bride invites the full wedding party to stand up and renew their own vows—to a spouse, to a friend, to a pet, to the universe . . . with disastrous results. It’s moving and funny, meta and of-the-moment, the way Noa’s books always are.
The fact that the novel ends with a steamy scene on a Positano beach is just one more reason I know Noa Callaway and I are psychically connected. Family legend has it that my mother was conceived on a beach in Positano, and while that might not seem like information most kids would cherish knowing, I was raised in part by my grandmother, who defines the term sex-positive.
I’ve always wanted to visit Positano.
Vows makes me feel almost like I have.
I check my phone for a response from Terry about the signed books. Nothing. I can’t let Noa’s readers down tonight. Especially because
Two Hundred and Sixty-Six Vows may be the last Noa Callaway book they get to read for a while....
Our biggest author is four months late delivering her next manuscript. Four unprecedented months late.
After a decade of delivering a book each year, the prolific Noa Callaway suddenly seems to have no plans of turning in her next draft. My attempts to get past Terry and connect with Noa have been fruitless. It’s only a matter of time before our production department expects me to turn over a tightly edited—and nonexistent—manuscript.
But that’s a panic attack for another day. Alix is due back from maternity leave next week, and the pressure will be on.
I’m flipping through my mail, waiting impatiently for Terry’s response, knowing I need to get down to the venue— when my hands find a little brown box in the middle of the mail Joe delivered. It’s no bigger than a deck of cards. My distracted mind recognizes the return address and I gasp.
It’s the Valentine’s gift I had handmade for my fiancé, Ryan. I unwrap the paper, slide open the box, and smile.
The polished wood square is pale and smooth, about the size and thickness of a credit card. It unfolds like an accordion, revealing three panels. In fine calligraphy is The List I made long ago. It’s all the attributes I wanted to find in the person I’d fall in love with. It’s my Ninety-Nine Things List, and Ryan checks off every one.
I’ve been told that most girls learn about love from their moms. But the summer I turned ten and my brother, David, was twelve, my mom was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She went fast, which everyone says is a mercy, but it isn’t. It just about killed my oncologist father that even he couldn’t save her.
My mom was a pharmacoepidemiologist on the board of the National Academy of Medicine. She used to fly all over the world, sharing stages with Melinda Gates and Tony Fauci, giving speeches on infectious diseases at the CDC and WHO. She was brilliant but also warm and funny. She could be tough, but she also knew how to make everyone feel special, seen.
She died on a Tuesday. It was raining out the hospital window, and her hand seemed smaller than mine. I held it as she razzed me for the last time.
“Just don’t be a dermatologist.”
(When you’re born into generations of doctors, you make jokes about imagined medical hierarchies.)
“I hear there’s good money in it,” I said. “And the hours.”
“Can’t beat the hours.” She smiled at me. Her eyes were the same blue as mine, everybody said. We used to have the same thick, straight brown hair, too, but in so many ways, my mom didn’t look like my mom anymore.
“Lanie?” Her voice had gone softer and yet more intense. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise to find someone you really, really love.”
My mother liked overachievers. And she seemed to be asking, with her final words, for me to overachieve in love. But how? When your mom dies and you are young, the worst part is that you know there’s all this stuff you’ll need to know, and now who’s going to teach you?
It wasn’t until college that I was introduced to the writer who would teach me about love: Noa Callaway.
One day after class, I came back to my dorm, and the tissues were flying on my roommate Dara’s side of the room where she and her friends were hunched together.
Dara held a half-eaten Toblerone out to me and waved a book in my direction. “Have you read this yet?”
I shook my head without glancing at the book, because Dara and I did not have the same reading tastes. I was pre-med like my brother and obsessing over my organic chemistry reader so I could move back to Atlanta and become a doctor like everyone else in my family. Dara was majoring in sociology, but her shelves were stuffed with paperbacks with cursive fonts.
“This book is the only thing that got Andrea over Todd,” she said.
I looked at Dara’s friend Andrea, who fell face-first into another girl’s lap.
“I’m crying because it’s so beautiful,” Andrea sobbed.
When Dara and her friends left in search of lattes, I felt the gold foil letters of the book’s title staring me down from across the room. I picked it up and held it in my hand.
Ninety-Nine Things I’m Going to Love About You by Noa Callaway.
I don’t know why, but the title made me think of my mother’s last words. Her plea that I find someone I really, really loved. Was she sending me a message over the transom?
I opened the book and started reading, and a funny thing happened: I couldn’t put it down.
Ninety-Nine Things is the story of Cara Kenna, a young woman struggling to survive a divorce. There’s a suicide attempt and a stint in a psych ward, but the tone is so brightly funny, I’d commit myself if it meant I could hang out with her.
In the hospital, Cara has only time to kill, and she does so by reading the ninety-nine romance novels in the psych ward library. At first, she’s cynical, but then, despite herself, she finds a line she likes. She writes it down. She says it aloud. Soon she’s writing down her favorite line from every book. By the day of her release, she has ninety-nine things to hope for in a future love affair.
I read the book in one sitting. I was buzzing all over. I looked at the chemistry homework I had to do and felt something inside me had changed.
Ninety-Nine Things held all the words I’d been looking for since my mother died. It spelled out how to really, really love. With humor, with heart, and with bravery. It made me want to find that love myself.
At the back of the book, where the author’s bio usually is, the publisher included three blank pages, lined and numbered from one to ninety-nine.
Okay, Mom, I’d thought, sitting down to get to work. I wasn’t sure which of Dara’s friends this book had belonged to, but it was now undeniably, cosmically mine.
The beauty of such a large list was that it allowed me to weave between weird and brave, between superficial and marrow-deep and deal-breaker serious. In between
Enthusiastic about staying up all night discussing potential past lives and
Answers the phone when his mother calls, I’d written:
Doesn’t own clogs, unless he’s a chef or Dutch. At the very end, number ninety-nine, I wrote,
Doesn’t die. I felt my mom was with me, between the lines of that list. I felt if I could pursue this kind of love, then she’d be proud of me, wherever she was.
I don’t know that I ever
really thought I’d find a guy who embodied my whole list. It was more the exercise of committing to paper love’s wondrous possibilities.
But then . . . I met Ryan, and everything—well, all ninety-nine things—just clicked. He’s perfect for me. Scratch that. He’s perfect, period.
I fold up the wooden panels, tuck my gift back into the box. I can’t wait to give this to him tomorrow on Valentine’s Day.
Copyright © 2022 by Lauren Kate. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
