Marlo hadn’t told her.

“Did Marlo tell you?” Madeline asked.

“Tell me what?” Angie said.

“I can’t let you publish the book,” Madeline said.

Silence.

Madeline waited. Maybe that was it. She had spoken the words. Could she just hang up?

But then Angie started to yell. Whippet-thin Angie, in her pencil skirts and Louboutin slingbacks, had an angry voice that nearly shattered Madeline’s phone. Madeline couldn’t make out every word, but the gist was something like, You can’t just… The book, Madeline, you don’t make those decisions, we do… Murder, bloody murder. This is going to be big, so big, so huge, you have no fucking idea how you’re hurting yourself, might as well get a razor and slit your… How you’re hurting me… I’ve bragged about this book to my friends, my actual friends… yoga… my son’s soccer games…

Then she took a breath. She said, “The marketing budget is quadruple what we gave you for Islandia. This is a whole new league for you. You will be right up there with your cousin Stephen.”

Here, Madeline interjected. “He’s not my cousin.”

“You can’t not publish it,” Angie said. “That isn’t a choice.”

“It is, though,” Madeline said. “It’s my choice, and I’m sorry, Angie. I’m sorry I’m taking back the book, I’m sorry I’m disappointing you.”

“You’re more than disappointing me, Madeline,” Angie said. “This isn’t catching my fourteen-year-old daughter smoking on the corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue. That was disappointing. This is something far worse.”

“I can’t let you publish it,” Madeline said. “I’m sorry I ever wrote it. I should never have let that story see the light of day.”

Silence. It sounded as if Angie were lighting a cigarette of her own.

She said, “It’s a good book, Madeline.”

“But I don’t feel good about it,” Madeline said. “Listen, I don’t want to keep you from your other work. Nothing you can say is going to change my mind.”

“Oh, yeah?” Angie said. “How about this? You’ll be hearing from our legal department.”

And with that, she hung up.

An hour later, as Madeline was lying on the sofa of the apartment, reading the latest issue of the New Yorker, hoping for another great idea, her phone rang.

It was Redd Dreyfus.

Madeline sighed. He was calling to tell her… that she would have to pay her advance back? That he was firing her as a client? That her career as a novelist was over, and she might as well never traverse a bridge or tunnel to the borough of Manhattan again, because as far as the publishing world was concerned, she was dead?

Madeline steeled herself for the worst. “Hello?” she said.

“Madeline King,” he said. “How are you, my darling?”

Redd sounded relaxed, but he also sounded old. He had been fiftyish when he signed Madeline as a client, which would make him seventyish now.

She said, “I’m so sorry, Redd.” She swallowed. “I can’t do it. The truth is, I blatantly used my best friend’s affair as the basis for that novel. Not everything is the same, but the story is hers, not mine, and I can’t let it see the light of day.”

“Aha,” Redd said. “You do realize it’s not against the law to base your novel on true experiences, even if they belong to someone else, right? I mean, let’s say your friend reads the book and feels you’re trying to pass her real-life story off as fiction. Let’s say she hires a lawyer. Those cases rarely see the light of day.”

“It’s not against the written law, maybe,” Madeline said. “But it’s against my law. The law I have with myself. I wrote the book because I was desperate for an idea, and then one fell into my lap. The timing was uncanny. I convinced myself that it was okay, that I would change the details and no one would recognize it. But the essence of Grace’s story is also the essence of my story, and it’s not fair of me to use it. It’s unethical.”

“Well,” Redd said. He took a long pause. “It sounds like this is the right decision for your soul. I applaud you for that.”

“You do?” Madeline said.

“I do. I know Angie unleashed her holy wrath, but I got her calmed down.”

“She said I’d be hearing from their legal department,” Madeline said.

“She’s trying to scare you. She’s desperate to publish that book—it seems like a personal mission of hers—but it’s your intellectual property. The thing that matters is that you wrote a really good book. And if you did it once, guess what?”

“What?” Madeline said.

“You can do it again,” Redd said. “You’ll come up with another idea, trust me.”

Madeline said, “But what if Angie doesn’t like it as much? Will I have to pay my advance back?”

“Hell no!” Redd said. “I mean, does Angie have to accept it? Hell yes. But I have full confidence that you’ll deliver something even better, Madeline. If not on the next try, then on a subsequent try. And even if you don’t ever deliver, it’s very difficult for a publisher to get advance money back once it’s been paid out. I’ve had authors who have been ten years late on delivery! I’ve had authors who disappeared to South America! I’ve had authors who plagiarized the work of their teenage children!” Redd’s voice was growing animated. Madeline knew he had put on weight in recent years, and she feared his having a heart attack right there at his desk. Thankfully, he calmed down. “My dear, I’ve seen it all. I know you feel like you’re the only author who has ever used the travails of a close friend as fiction fodder, but, I assure you, you are not. What’s the popular phrase? Write what you know. Authors do this kind of thing all the time. And I realize you feel like you’re not going to be able to write something else, but, Madeline, I’m telling you, you are. You don’t even have to believe in yourself. I’m your agent. I’ll do the believing.”