“Hey,” I said, beaming at Blake. “I really liked what you had to say. Are you busy right now? Maybe we could talk some more.”

He smiled back at me, genuinely interested. I probably wouldn’t have even needed any succubus glamour to convince him. “I wish I could . . . but I have to go to work. Are you free later tonight? Like after dinner?”

“Sure.” We swapped numbers, and as we were about to part, I asked in a low voice, “You don’t think they’ll do something anyway, do you? Despite what they said about . . . you know, putting the Zamboni plan on hold?”

His grin broadened. “No, they won’t do the Zamboni plan. I’m sure of it.”

“How?”

“Because they’re out of spray paint.”

“So they’ll get more.”

He shook his head. “Not without me. I’m their supplier. I work at Home Depot.”

I again found myself with time to kill in Vancouver. It was a beautiful day, and the temperature was unseasonably warm for April. So, I went and walked along the waterfront. The water seemed bluer than our own Puget Sound back in Seattle, but maybe that was just because the weather tended to be sunnier here. I wandered through Stanley Park afterward and then finally meandered back to my hotel. As I did, I again passed one of the T-shirt shops. They’d changed their display and now showed a shirt with a U.S. map on it that read: Dear Canada, Please Invade.

Back in my room, I booted up my laptop to check my e-mail. There were a few from the bookstore’s mailing list that I ignored, as well as the usual spam. Along with those messages, I had one from greygoose.com’s mailing list, a picture of a cat with some nonsensical caption that Cody had forwarded me, and a letter from Maddie.

It was a mass e-mail she’d sent out this morning. It read: Hey, guys! I decided to start a blog. Check it out. A link followed. Even though every instinct told me not to, I clicked it.

Should have listened to those instincts.

Pictures of her and Seth bombarded me. They’d gone to the Seattle Aquarium last night and taken assorted photos posing by puffins, squids, and other sea creatures. Worse, Seth’s nieces were with them. That nearly killed me. Seth had five adorable blond nieces, ranging from four to fourteen. I loved them to pieces, and breaking up with him had been like breaking up with them too. The girls all looked reasonably happy, and I wondered if they even remembered me. Well, of course they did. It hadn’t been that long. But I knew I’d keep fading from their minds until eventually, I was just some vague memory of their uncle’s ex.

I shut down the laptop and decided to head down to the hotel’s bar.

It wasn’t quite dinnertime, so the place was fairly deserted. I took a seat at the bar near the television and promptly made friends with the bartender. Three gimlets later, I’d also made friends with an older couple visiting from San Francisco and some businessmen in town from Winnipeg. We were laughing about a recent movie when the TV suddenly changed from a curling match to static. The bartender pushed buttons on the remote ineffectually.