“Ah,” she said, and he kissed her there, up against the overfilled refrigerator, the smells of salami and Gorgonzola and very ripe peaches rising around them. The cold can pressed to her collarbone, and his mouth, warm and soft and knowing.

That was the start of it.

At Jin-Woo’s Copy Hop she wrote the two-sentence cover letter to the university president and watched the pages of the initialed and signed contract go through the fax machine while Ramon told her about his latest idea for a movie: Die Hard meets Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

“Woman hires a hit man—she’s tired of her husband screwing around, you see it? But a chick shows up, a hit woman. Then she turns out to be a man after all. A transvestite. So the rich lady, she’s all confused because she’s got the hots for another woman, and then she finds out she’s a he anyway.” Ramon’s tattoos glowed in the fluorescent lights. “I’m thinking Penelope Cruz.”

“As the transvestite?” Angie could usually coax a smile out of Ramon, but today he was wound up in fame and fortune. He frowned at her lack of vision.

“It’s been done,” she told him. “Victor/Victoria, The Crying Game.”

Ramon leaned across the counter, muscles in his shoulders rolling. “Angie,” he said. “Listen to me, girl. You going to grab a good thing when you see it, or let this one get away from you too?”

There’s the question, Angie thought as she went back to the computers to write the harder letter.

She could do this by computer, but she wanted more control. One click and e-mail was gone into the ether, as absolute and remorseless as the spoken word. The letter she could carry around in her pocket until the right moment came, and then even once it was in the mailbox she might be able to get it back; she knew all the letter carriers.

… we understand from President Bray’s letter that time is of the essence, and so we will be arriving in Ogilvie toward the end of next week …

She went through it step by step, answering every question she could anticipate, working hard to strike the right tone: cooperative, thorough, detached. At the end she hesitated.

We look forward to this opportunity to work with Miss Zula.

Her fingers hesitated above the keys while she listened to the sentence humming in her mind. For whatever role you may have played in bringing this work our way, many thanks.