“At Finders Keepers, we believe in love. We believe in romance. We believe in first meetings, second dates, third anniversaries and relationships that can last a lifetime.”

Sure, a corporation could believe in all those things, Marissa darling, but do you?

The audience, made up of mostly women in the middle years, seemed rapt. Why were they here, Marissa wondered. The questionnaire didn’t seem to take into account all that she herself wanted. None of the three women she had called were anything like Linda, and dangitall, she thought with undeniable clarity, she wanted Linda.

Dear Self:

Blithering is unattractive.

Love, Marissa

P.S. Pay attention to what you’re doing!

Startled to find herself mouth half-open and not sure what she’d been saying, she glanced at the screen and tried to play back the last few seconds.

“No computer can really capture the complexity of a human being,” she extemporized, silently thanking Helena Boxer. “We are as diverse and complicated as the planet we live on. The universe is in a blade of glass—and in all of us.”

Oh hell, where was she going with this flashback to English 1A?

“Your lives are full to the brim already, however. My business partner would kill me for putting it this way but we meet a thousand new people a year and I think we’re all too busy to sort the dreck from the gold. So why not let a computer help? After submitting your questionnaire, you would get a profile report like this. Compatibility scores of ninety-five and above, well, they’re not dreck. And among those people there is a high probability you will find twenty-four karat gold. All the mystery and magic and frustration of dating and getting to know someone will still have to happen, though. The computer does the analysis—you do the living.”

So she had just violated one of Ocky’s rules of marketing: she’d focused potential clients on what Finders Keepers couldn’t do for them. She clicked to the next slide and tried to get back on track.

Her mouth, it seemed, had other plans.

“You could walk out the door right now and bump into someone who is a ninety-seven. You could meet the Perfect Someone stranded on a desert island, even. But if you don’t like those odds, then Finders Keepers will help. Three out of four of our clients are still with someone they met through our service as long as three years ago. Many five years ago or more.”

That, she told herself, hadn’t come out quite right.

She wasn’t sure how she got through the rest of the presentation. She gave away a number of business cards but wasn’t ready when a woman asked, “Have you filled out your own questionnaire? How did it turn out for you?”

Thinking fast, Marissa said, “I have and I met three really nice people. If anything, it was more choice than I could handle.”

The echo of her words—not untrue but far from representing the whole story—stayed with her as she limped to the car and drove back to the office. She tried to drown out her thoughts with Fatboy Slim but she couldn’t get the woman’s reaction out of her head—that excited, hopeful grin. For a moment she felt like the Take It Off saleswoman, saying whatever the potential client wanted to hear.