It was one minute and fourteen seconds past six P.M. when John stopped looking at the clock, turned off his laptop, and stood. He’d picked at research until he’d been cross-eyed and had been fifteen-hundred words into a description of the house when he’d sat back, re-read, and deleted every one-point-five thousand of them. The rest of the day had dived from there. Don’t give them bullshit, he’d told himself, give them a story. It was a concept that would be all fine and good, if he could damn well figure out what that story was.
He didn’t berate himself for giving up. Instead, he went back to the room, and locked up his laptop in its case—a precaution he’d never taken before, but an instinct he wasn’t going to ignore if it was pinging at him to do so—then pulled out a dove grey suit and a
