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still spiritually within his reach, but she wasn’t. She was thinking about herself. She was thinking that he was the only editor in the world who would be interested in publishing her memoir, and now he was going to be gone.
    She needed to get back here, out of her thoughts and into the room. In what was surely a moment of need for Edward, she had it in her power to give him a gift—the gift of her full attention—but she was squandering the moment by getting tangled up in worries about her career.
    She had always felt protected by Edward’s presence in his publishing house. Her books had never sold that much, and there were people in the company who questioned his loyalty to her, but as long as he was there, she’d felt sure that nothing she wrote would be judged solely by its potential to earn a profit, and that everything she wrote would have a fighting chance of being published. And almost as important, she was sure that everything she’d published would stay in print. (Having one of your books go out of print—it’s not like having one of your children die, but it’s the closest that an experience in the world of letters can come.)
    As she struggled to put her worries about him ahead of her worries about herself, she wasn’t condemning herself; she wasn’t wishing that she could be some saintly creature, composed entirely of concern for other people. But at the same time, she wished she could be a little bit better than she was.
    “My writers are already being redistributed,” he said. “They’ve got you lined up with one of our younger editors. He’s eager to meet you. He’s an admirer. He’s read all your stuff.”
    She didn’t quite believe this. She couldn’t quite buy the picture of a young male editor who had read all her stuff.
    “What’s his name?”
    “Kevin. Kevin Cleaver.”
    “Kevin Cleaver. Jesus Christ. You’re kidding, right?”
    “You know him?”
    “No. But the name.”
    “It
is
a frightening name. But he’s a good editor, and he’s a comer. He’s a good person to have in your corner.”
    Florence already didn’t like him. She was too old to be impressed by comers.
    She saw him as some swaggering cocksman, pulling out his iPhone to check
Gawker
so he could keep track of who was up and who was down.
    It was hard to believe that Kevin Cleaver, the ninja of the late-night literary scene, the
Gawker
checker, would give a damn about anything she had to say. Her memoir, which had seemed a solid thing in her mind when she had thought that she would eventually be sending it to Edward, seemed flimsy and ignorable when she imagined it arriving on Kevin Cleaver’s desk.
    It wouldn’t arrive on Kevin Cleaver’s desk, though. She’d have to email it to him. He probably never even looked at his regular mail. Kevin Cleaver, master of the new.
    She asked Edward about his next round of treatments, and when it seemed as if he had said as much as he wanted to say, they talked about Obama—it was his first year in office—and then they talked about Edward’s summer house in Rhinebeck. He and Susan hoped to move there full-time. Florence had no interest in his summer house—hearing about other people’s houses was as boring as hearing about other people’s dreams—and in other circumstances she would have told him so, but today she smiled and nodded as he told her about repainting and finding a roofer and redoing the floors.
    After she left the restaurant, she thought that the struggle she’d been having—the whole internal drama that had been playing out as she’d sat there trying to look as if she were listening to him—was something she could have told him about. He would have understood; he would have offered her the implicit reassurance that this kind of struggle is simply one of the things that come with being human. He might have even been relieved. When you’re facing death, people start to treat you with caution—caution and a kind of superficial reverence. He