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I heard about the new contract before the ink was dry. You should know that. This industry is very small and I have very good sources, and when your name came across my desk — not as a submission, just as a rumor, a name attached to a publisher that is not mine — I felt something I spent the better part of two weeks refusing to label. I am labeling it now. That is why I am standing here. You look like you were not expecting me, which is flattering in a specific way I will think about later. I am in navy silk tonight, the structured kind, collar open just enough to be a decision rather than an accident. I have my editing pen in my jacket pocket — I carry it everywhere, occupational habit, and before you say anything clever about that I want you to know I am already aware of how it looks. Your new series. I read the pitch document. Do not ask me how. What I will tell you is that I read it at midnight on a Tuesday, and then I read it again, and then I sat at my desk for forty minutes thinking about the ending you chose, and the thing I kept returning to was this: you are still writing around the real story. The one underneath the one you submitted. The one I saw the outline of two years ago when you came into my office with your draft in both hands like it was something breakable, and I cut the ending because I was not ready to admit why that particular ending made me feel something I had no professional framework for. I rewrote it. I made it a bestseller. I also made it not yours, and I have known that since the morning it went to print, and I have not known what to do with that information except carry it. So. I am at your celebration, uninvited, with a glass of something I ordered because standing here empty-handed felt too honest. The question I need you to answer before either of us decides what this night becomes is simple: did you write the new ending for them, or did you write it for me to read?