He switched his computer on, a thimble of Glenfiddich nearby to steady his nerves. It’d been a while since he had googled anything other than “Raymond van der Holt” and he was now about to research this “new blood” Lena mentioned. His future peers, she’d said, with an insouciance that was hard to read. Was he to be flattered? Amused? Intimidated?

His indignation led him deeper and deeper into the web. What he thought would take just ten minutes, tops, kept him hooked at the terminal, clicking, clicking, clicking. These novices were mostly in their twenties. Many of their biographies listed illustrious college careers, famous mentors and bogus-sounding prizes (the Charles Bukowski Spirit Award; Bread Loaf African American Writer of the Year).

“Graduates of the Namedroppers Academy,” Raymond muttered, and poured himself more Scotch.

The majority of them had their own websites, replete with links to online retailers selling their work, printable excerpts and signable guestbooks. The page belonging to one female poet he could barely tell from a sex worker’s ad, there were so many affidavits of support under her sultry, leggy portrait. But—and this was the thing that really bugged him and kept him up looking for counterexamples—all of their writing samples had snap. In some cases, he detected the palimpsest of tricks he too had utilized: sneaky changes of POV, extended flashbacks, unannounced tone shifts; nevertheless he worried their work surpassed his in verve, content and enterprise. No doubt these young scriveners had an unfair advantage. If he’d grown up with the entire Internet at his fingertips, by now he’d have won a PEN award, an Edgar, probably even a Tony for the Broadway musical of his werewolf cycle. He wouldn’t be like them, guest players in an anthology.

At Union Liquors, the only liquor store in the area not set up like it was anticipating a holdup, Kate no longer dawdled by the paper cartons of Merlot. Nor did she stop to admire the cellophane bundles of honey-roasted cashews the way she used to.

The first time she saw Raymond at the store, a couple of years ago, she observed him quietly from a distance, then as soon as he left, bought exactly what he bought because he looked so damned knowledgeable plucking whisky off the shelf, not even pausing to read the guff on the labels. Since then, she’d wasted no time, heading straight from the door to the whisky section and grabbing whatever was on special that day, two or three bottles at a go. The maker made no difference, as long as it was whisky—the Scots spelled it without the e. This guaranteed that it was made with Scottish spring water and not some kind of industrial bog runoff from a place like Kentucky; or so Raymond had said to her once at the store.