“Good.” His eyes dip to my mouth for the briefest of breaths and he clears his throat again, stands up even straighter, if that’s possible. “The early sales data says it will reach a lot of people.”
It’s all about hitting those sales targets. “And if it flops, I’ll just resign in disgrace.”
“What’s your fallback plan?” he asks, grave.
I sigh. “I guess I’ll go be a doctor.”
He exhales what sounds like a laugh. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe you went to med school.”
“Because I’m just a pretty face?”
“Of course not. Not that you’re not—” He holds up his hand, shakes his head. Tries again. “Because you’re so good at what you do.”
My heart rate ramps up again.
“But,” he continues, “I’m willing to bet you’re good at anything you do.”
The slow, languorous honey in my veins obscures my thoughts. Which must be why I say what I say next. “Want to call my mom and tell her that?”
His eyes are warm, intent. “Does she not think you’re good at what you do?”
I take a breath. Did I just unseal the door? How did Ryan of all people cause me to?
“She doesn’t really understand my work,” I say, leaning a hip against the bureau. “She’s from a different generation, a different world altogether. To her, the internet is for Facebook propaganda and Armenian political news. She doesn’t really read, let alone English books. So my work is just…outside her purview. Medicine, she understands. It’s global and goes back as far as humankind. So yeah, she’d have rather I’d stuck with that.”
He nods. “Why didn’t you?”
“You mean why did I focus on creating the brand that got me a mid-six-figure book deal from your publisher?” I bat my eyelashes at him.
The amused glint in his eyes is slight, but it’s there. “I mean, becoming a doctor is no small feat. Med school is competitive and challenging. And you were almost at the finish line. You were, what, in your second year of residency when you changed course?”
“Stalk me much?”
“Anyone who listens to your podcast knows that.”
My chin drops. “You’ve listened to my podcast?”
“Of course I have.”
Although I suspected it already, the confirmation is still startling. Maybe it shouldn’t be—he was working on my book, after all. Any publicist worth their paycheck would do their research, listen to a few episodes to get a sense of the brand and its market. But still, it’s just so unexpected of the Ryan I thought I had a handle on.
“We started the podcast while I was still in my residency, and things kind of snowballed,” I say. It was a few months after the first video went viral. The potential audience forSPOY’s messaging seemed huge, given the response on YouTube, so we set up a makeshift studio in Maral’s tiny apartment in Boston and rode the wave. “Within a year, my following had ballooned, we were offeredsponsorships and paid ads, I signed with Nadia, I was doing tons of speaking events…it kind of took over my life. I didn’t have time to do both.”
“How did you choose?”
My father died, collapsing my entire world and crushing my ambition for medicine in the rubble.
“The immediate positive feedback fromSo Proud of Youshowed me that there’s more than one way to help people,” I say. “I liked the community it created. And I wanted to see where I could takeit.”
It’s not the full story, but it’s not untrue. The podcast, the community we built, was a ray of light in the eternal darkness of that time.
He takes me at my word. “And Maral felt the same.”
Mar’s path was an altered version of mine. The same year we started the podcast, she started an entry-level job as an environmental engineer at a Boston urban planning firm after finishing her master’s. She’s kind of a weirdo in that she likes to have a bit of downtime every now and again, and working two basically full-time jobs was not her idea of fun. Finally, she decided—with some gentle, not-at-all-overbearing coaxing from me—that it was worth exclusively working onSPOY,to see out its potential. She even agreed to move to New York, despite our parents’ protests. I was making enough by then to pay her well, and she’s always been fiscally responsible.
“Yes,” I say, “so if you want to tell her parents she’s awesome at what she does too, you’d be doing us both a solid.”
“Not fans there, either?”
