As I approached my apartment door, I saw an open dirty diaper on the floor. I knew instantly that it wasn’t a real dirty diaper. It was a chocolate bar melted inside a diaper. That was how Natalie’s sense of humor worked. I bent down, scooped it up, folded it in half, and opened my door. There was a note that had been pushed under the door with some effort. It was crinkled because it had been almost impossible to get something as thick as a piece of paper under the door.

It said, “Sorry about last week. Your phone is in the diaper.”

I tore the lining out and yes, my phone was there. It was dead. I plugged it in and pulled my high heels off. I’d just walked six blocks in them.

Fletch had been a good date. I tried to figure out why. Immediately, part of the appeal was clear. He’d been on the other side of the theater the whole night. That prevented him from making the same sorts of mistakes other men made. For example, he did not talk to me when I was trying to pay attention or make so much noise that he bothered the other people in the theater. At no point in the date had he tried to sneak his hand up my thigh or snake his arm around my waist without my permission.

In the end, it boiled down to one thing. He had spent the evening as my date but concentrated on something important that was not me. I liked that. I got bored with a man showering me with attention for hours on end.

The date with Fletch had been perfect. I arrived, made the proper impression on him, he’d left to play with the orchestra, we went to dinner, and he walked me home. He had his hands on me the appropriate amount of time for a first date. He hadn’t said anything stupid while at the same time making it very clear that he was attracted to me.

I sat on a blush velvet pouf and rubbed my feet through my stockings. I didn’t know what to do. Normally, I would not call a man and invite him on a second date. Normally, I would wait for him to ask me out. If I called Fletch, what would that mean? That I wanted to date him? How much power would that give him?

Then I realized something I did not like. I never wanted to go on dates with the men who took me out. They always had high expectations of what a woman like me could give them. I didn’t like the pressure. When I had been with Fletch, there had been no pressure. He expected nothing beyond the one date. Perhaps that was the core of his appeal.

I got up and went into the kitchen to think about that.

By then, my phone was charged enough that I could restart it as long as I kept it plugged in. There were roughly forty text messages. A few of them were from Natalie and they had been sent in the last two hours.

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I dealt with her first, typing out, “Just forget the whole thing.”

I had to put a lid on that situation one way or another because I still had to see her. I worked for a recording studio, not as a sound tech, but as an administrator. Natalie was a singer with pipes like Adele and she couldn’t get a break. Carver Criche had treated her very badly, always promising to help her with his vast web of connections and never coming through. He was a bit of a legend in the industry, not for jerking artists around, but for getting results. If he helped her, she’d get the break she needed.

For me, the problem was that I loved trouble. I loved getting into trouble. I loved hijinx and pranks and being somewhere you shouldn’t be in order to have something outrageous happen. That was how I’d gotten looped into prodding a young man in the ribs with a fake gun. It was dumb… and kind of awesome. I never would have pulled a stunt like that by myself. I wasn’t the right build to force anyone to do anything. If I had been alone, any man I pulled a gun on would have me on the ground in less than a minute. Natalie’s muscle had made kidnapping Fletch possible.

Except obviously, it wasn’t supposed to be Fletch. It was supposed to be Carver.

Ever since she knocked me out with a brick, I began to wonder if Carver knew a thing or two about Natalie that I didn’t know. Maybe there was a reason why she wasn’t a superstar that I hadn’t been able to see. Whatever. It didn’t matter. I’d been fooled into thinking she was a victim and maybe, despite everything, she still was… I just couldn’t help her anymore.

The second most recent text was from Simon. He was asking me if I was on a date with his cousin with furious undertones.

I pulled up the message. “Yes, I was out with Fletch tonight. At the ballet.”

“I bet you just loved that,” he replied with an emoji of a football tacked on.

I didn’t reply and continued down the list of people who had texted me: my sister, my other sister, my other sister, my sister from another mister, my mom, my sister’s MIL (who wanted to borrow my wheat grinder), and Fletch.

I sat up. It came in with a new batch of messages my phone had retrieved and I didn’t notice it when I was busy typing to my family that I wasn’t dead, I had just left my phone somewhere.

Fletcher’s text was direct. “Do you want to see me again?”

“Aren’t I poison?” I replied.

“Yes or no?” was the next message that popped up on my screen.

He was good. I could have sent him misleading, yet flirty, text messages for a month without answering.

I looked at the screen and smiled. I liked directness.

“Yes,” I typed.

“When?” he wrote back.

I didn’t know the answer to that. I’d been without my phone for a week. I knew my sisters wanted me to go shopping with them the next day, and I didn’t know when we would be finished.

Sunday?

“Library date on Sunday?”

“I’ll meet you at two.” Then he typed, “Good night, adorable rat.”

And even though I typed various things to him to try to get him to have a conversation with me, he didn’t type another thing. He was out for the count.