I sipped my wine.

“Not like that,” Sarah said. “You’re drinking like a girl. Here, watch me.” She tipped back her nearly full glass, polished it off in four swallows. She put the glass back down, said, “Hit me.”

I filled it.

“We need to do this more often,” Sarah said. “It’s been kind of stressful around here lately, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

No kidding. I’d been home only a couple of days, having returned from my father’s fishing camp, where, not to understate it or anything, all hell had broken loose. It was the third time in as many years that I’d found myself in a pickle—now there’s a word for it—for which I had no training, and where I was in way over my head.

I had promised Sarah, and myself, that no more would I allow myself to get sucked into dangerous situations, not that I had wanted it to happen those other times. I wasn’t cut out for it. I was, and am, a writer of so-so science fiction novels, paying the bills writing features for the Metropolitan newspaper, where Sarah is, depending on the day, my editor. At a large daily newspaper, you can get chewed out by so many people higher up the food chain than yourself that it’s hard to narrow down the bosses to whom you report to just one person.

“Yeah,” I said, “very stressful. But he doesn’t make it any easier, acting like that. And I swear, he’s hitting me up for ten, twenty bucks every day, it seems. And it’s just entertainment. Renting movies, seeing movies, buying video games. I don’t spend what he does on enter—”

“Drink,” Sarah said.

I obeyed. “Do we have another bottle of this stuff?” I asked. Sarah nodded. “Where’s Angie tonight?”

Angie was in her second year at Mackenzie University, but since the school was in the city, and we lived in that city, she was not in residence.

“Class,” Sarah said. “Evening lecture or something.”

“I hardly ever see her around here. Sometimes I don’t even think she comes home every night.”

“She has a boyfriend,” Sarah said. The comment hung in the air for a while, which gave me time to consider its implications. “And she’s nearly twenty,” Sarah said. “If she boarded at university, if she’d gone clear across the country somewhere, you’d never know when she came home and when she didn’t.”

I finished off my glass, got up, and went to the fridge. “Where’s the other bottle?”

“It’s in there, just look,” Sarah said. “Did I tell you about the foreign editor thing?”

“What foreign editor thing?”

“They posted it. They need a new foreign editor. Garth’s going to the editorial board, where he can write ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that.’”

“Are you sure there’s another bottle?”

“Do I have to come over there myself and embarrass you?”

“Look, I’m either going blind or there’s no wine in here at—hang on, here it is. Okay, so, you want that job?”