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businesswoman, a sentiment I share, by the way, and I think he’s the one who’s supposed to keep track of all this stuff, a sentiment I’m willing to believe he shares. He just likes to put on a show.
    “He’s the executive producer at Monarch, Rachel,” he said in a tone clearly intended to make me feel stupid. “And he called me, out of the blue, to ask about Little Boy Lost .”
    That sounded strange. “Not the first book in the series? And he called you ? You hadn’t submitted it to him?”
    “I never submit to Hugh,” Adam said. “I submit to one of the readers in his acquisitions area, and they pass on the ones they like to him. I submitted it to Sheila York, but it was just yesterday. There’s no way she read through it and recommended it to Hugh that fast.”
    I was really considering that crumb cake. If I could get Adam to talk for a long time, I might be able to get a bite in, anyway. And since I really am not one to buy in on his dramatic crescendos, I had only been moderately interested, not enthralled, at what he’d been saying. “So what does that mean?” I asked. That should get a lengthy response. I grabbed the crumb cake and took a mammoth bite.
    “I’m not sure what it means,” Adam said. And then he stopped talking.
    Dammit! Now he expected me to say something, and I had enough delicious carbohydrate in my mouth to keep me chewing for a good—no, a fantastic —half minute. Maybe if I just kept chewing . . .
    Sure enough. Adam must have thought I was putting him to the test, so he went on. “I mean, if he’s just calling because he’s heard about you and wants to see if there’s something there, that’s great ,” Adam said, speaking a little too quickly while I concentrated on chewing. “Maybe he’s checked your sales numbers and thinks you have a chance at the list next time out, which would help justify an option at least with his partners.”
    The “list” is the New York Times Best Sellers list, and my chances of making it are roughly equivalent to my being declared queen of the Netherlands. But Adam, a good agent, likes to think that my star is constantly on the rise and that the next step in my career is a trip to the list. I let him think it.
    I also let him continue to talk; it wouldn’t take long for me to get to the “wash it down with milk” step in the process, which my mother taught me when I was three.
    “Anyway, I think it’s an amazingly good sign that Hugh is asking for the book, Rachel. I can’t guarantee he’ll go for it—he’s not always open to anything but graphic novels—but him asking for it without being solicited can’t be seen as anything but encouraging.”
    Finally! I got a sip of milk in, cleared my mouth (realizing that all the stress on getting to swallow had pretty much destroyed my enjoyment of the snack), and considered. “How do you think he found out about it if Sheila York” (whoever she was) “didn’t give it to him?” I asked.
    “Well, he had a story, but you have to take it with a grain of salt,” Adam said. “No. A whole shaker of salt.”
    Okay, it worked: I was intrigued. “What does that mean?”
    “Keep in mind that he doesn’t consider mystery most of the time,” my agent told me in a tone that indicated I shouldn’t be insulted. “So he’s probably never heard your name before and certainly doesn’t know anything specific about what you’ve written.”
    “So obviously he’s going to jump right on an unknown book in the middle of a series from an author he’s never heard of before,” I said. “How the hell does that work?”
    “I told you all that because you need to understand that he has no point of reference,” Adam explained. “So he didn’t know that what he told me about Little Boy Lost was crazy.”
    Crazy was a word that had popped into my mind far too often for the past couple of days, and I didn’t like what it was doing to my stomach. Although that could have been the effect of