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Not that any of these things stops me from donating. No, I’m a Cade. We just arrange carpool.

“How are you feeling over there, Savvy?” my father calls out across the room. He’s sitting in a Hawaiian shirt, which he does on every blood day as his own joke, pumping his own ball with one hand while holding a Coke can in the other.

Just then the nurse returns to my side, and my anxiety skyrockets. I smile and manage a thumbs-up with my opposite hand, and my dad lifts his Coke can to cheer me.

“Hey, Sav.”

I’m staring at the enormous needle hovering over my skin as Ferris speaks.

“Savvy, look at me.”

I drag my eyes away and force myself to look at him, my chest thudding. Ferris’s eyes are soft, full of life. Unlike me, who is slowly becoming a corpse. “Remember that time we hosted that murder-mystery Christmas party? Everything went wrong just before it started. The chicken Parmesan burned, and the printer ran out of ink for those character cards you needed to give everyone, and we had that stupid fight over my costume?”

“You were supposed to be Santa, Ferris,” I say, squinting to avoid looking at the hovering needle. “You promised me you’d be Santa. It was kind of a key role.”

His smile widens. “What was it you yelled at me just as the pot boiled over?”

I think back to that night just after college and smile a little as the words come to mind. Begrudgingly, I say them aloud. “‘If you can’t dress up like a holly jolly Santa on the brink of a killing spree, I don’t even know what we’re doing here.’”

I feel the painful prick in my arm. Squeeze my eyes shut.

A moment later, I hear medical tape being ripped off its roll. I open my eyes. “There now,” the nurse says, securing the strip of tape over the needle in my arm.

I exhale for what I’m certain is the first time in a minute and turn back to Ferris. Already I can feel the color coming back to my cheeks, which is ironic as blood is also now dripping into the moving scale on the floor beside me.

To my surprise, though, Ferris’s expression has changed. His eyes are intense, thoughtful as they meet mine. “Whatever happened to those friends?”

“Oh,” I say, taken aback slightly at the turn in conversation. I try to remember who exactly had even come. There were six of us. I remember that clearly because of the character list for the party: one narcissistic Santa, one burnt-out Mrs. Claus, one Rudolf in a midlife crisis, one jealous Dasher, one mischievous elf, and one lonely snowman facing unrequited love with Mrs. Claus. I know Farrah and Michael were one of the couples, because back then we were inseparable. “I don’t know. I guess we all just . . . moved apart.”

“It’s so strange how that happens,” he muses. “One minute you do everything together and the next . . .” He shrugs.

I give the ball a long squeeze. It is odd how that happens sometimes. Farrah and I even still live in Nashville. After graduation we kept up for a while, but then work started to fill up our days, and we both started making friends with our new jobs, and within the year we were texting each other, saying we really had to have coffee soon, loading our texts with heart emojis, but never really pursuing anything. “I guess we just made different friends. I started hanging out with Lyla more. You got close to those guys from your work. I think we just find ‘our people’ as we go along in life.” I pluck a phrase Lyla likes to say for the moment. “Eventually we meet our kindred spirits.”

But Ferris doesn’t look convinced by my words, or like he even mildly agrees with them. Instead he’s thoughtful, almost brooding, and I watch him, waiting for him to pull together his thoughts and respond. For some reason, he cares.

“Look at this, Ferris.” Olivia snaps her fingers in the air. “Mom says we can save ten cents per square foot on the tablecloth if we rent from Enchanted Experiences.”

So, instead of me hearing what he has to say, Ferris eventually gets wrapped up in the wedding conversation as the three of them pass the laptop back and forth. I watch the Hallmark movie on the television stationed on the wall opposite for a while, squeezing my big red ball while trying to gather what’s going on onscreen through lipreading since the volume is so low. But eventually not even the tall blond woman and her candle-shop problems can hold my attention, and my mind wanders.

After all, I have my own mystery to solve. Just who is the mystery editor?

The thought has popped up a few times over the past several days, but always when I’m so busy rushing here and there, doing this or that, that I haven’t had a spare moment to dwell on it. Now, though, stuck in this chair attached to the wobbling blood machine, is the perfect time.

Could it be Yossi?

Nooo. He’s so afraid of doing anything to Ms. Pennington’s disliking he jumps at his own shadow. If he ever opened that filing cabinet, he’d stare at it silently for about half a second, slam the whole thing shut, and never look back again—even if the whole room was glowing.

Rob?

No. He’s much too . . . pleasant. And long-winded. He’d never put such gut-jabbing criticisms on paper. He’s such a people pleaser we have a time getting him to give any real critique for any of his authors. All his authors think they’re geniuses because he’ll go through a whole manuscript leaving only a few tiny comments here and there like, “Well, not to press, but under the normal standards of the English language, it is customary to use a punctuation point at the end of a sentence. In fact, the first recording of a punctuation point, derived from the Latin punctus, was in the middle of the sixteenth century, when . . .” When all he needed to say was, “Missing period.”

Clyve? No. Clyve handles the marketing just fine but can’t make heads or tails of things like “narrative arc.”

Well, that covers everyone at the Pen imprint. It must be someone at Trophy or Arch or Scribe. Unless . . .

For some unknown reason, my stomach flips, the thought alone making me feel a little bit dizzy.

“You’re coming along,” the nurse says reassuringly, observing my blood bag as she walks by.