“I was in Chicago for the American Library Association’s annual conference. I was supposed to present a paper on virtual reference.” Tim closed his eyes.

It had been a very boring paper to write. Reading it out loud didn’t make it any more exciting. When he’d finished he acknowledged the forced applause and then headed straight for the hotel’s lounge. At a conference like ALA you never got out of the hotel. You went from your room to the restaurant to the conference rooms and when you weren’t sitting listening patiently to someone’s statistics on usage by young adult patrons of new media materials you were talking about raising circulation statistic with piped-in music in small groups in the bar, or at best in pizza pubs just down the street. It was the first of three days of that and Tim was still jet-lagged and two hours off his normal rhythm. He thought he could just manage a beer or two before passing out.

When he’d arrived in the lounge, though, he’d found it taken over by his colleagues—dozens of women and a few men huddled around tables, talking excitedly about RFID chips and new chemical treatments for the preservation of acid-damaged texts. He’d groaned inwardly, knowing that at any second he would be sucked into the vortex of one of these conversations, which was likely to go on for most of the night.

Normally he would have been in heaven. Men made up only fifteen per cent of librarians nationwide—and men under sixty were ever rarer. They were welcome at pretty much any table they chose, and were guaranteed some nice harmless flirtation amidst the shop talk. With the bad news out of Canada, though, and things looking grimmer by the day, he was having trouble mustering any real interest in the relative merits of the Dewey Decimal system versus Library of Congress classification. That was when he saw her, a woman sitting alone at the bar wearing a silk blouse, her hair up in a tightly-pinned bun. She wore horn-rimmed glasses as if she’d invented the look. If she put a shawl on she would have looked fifty years old and dowdy. Without it she was in her mid-thirties and she caught every male eye in the room. As Tim walked up to the bar she looked up at him with a truly great pair of eyes, though he thought her mouth was a little too big for her face.

“Hi,” he said, not really understanding why he was talking to her. Or rather understanding perfectly but not knowing where it would go. “I’m Tim Kempfer. Reference, with Seattle Public.”

“Yes, I can see that,” she said, smiling warmly. She glanced down at his nametag and then back up at his face.

He laughed. It gave him an excuse to look down at her own tag, which dangled on a silver chain between her breasts. “Nancy Forester, Bergen County Public. That’s in New Jersey.” The tag said her specialty was Adult Circulation. “You just gave that talk,” she said. “The one on infomatics and virtual reference.”

“Did you hear it?” he asked.

She smiled again. Her mouth was just the right size, he decided, when she smiled like that. “No,” she admitted. “I just saw it on the program.”

They chatted easily for a while. Tim had always suffered from a distinct quality of shyness when talking to women in his adolescence and his early adult years. Ever since he’d been married, though, he’d found it effortless and endlessly pleasant. Since nothing could ever come of it, there was no real pressure. Nancy Forester proved more interesting, as well, than the average librarian. She had a pilot’s license, for one thing, and had some amazing stories to tell about flying small planes. She also had three dogs and he encouraged her to talk about them at length until she turned red and looked away.

“You’re just being nice,” she said, finally. “You don’t actually care about my Airedales.”

“You’d be surprised,” he said.

She excused herself to go to the restroom. When she stood up off her stool he reached over, not really thinking of anything, and ran a finger down her spine, sliding through the silk of her blouse. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. Just stood there, as if waiting for something more.

Tim put one foot down on the floor. He felt light-headed, and as if none of this were particularly real. The finger he’d used was the one that wore his wedding ring. He looked down at Nancy’s hand and saw she had one too.

He put his other foot down and stood directly behind her. His face was only a few inches from her ear. He didn’t know what he was going to say next, but he didn’t worry about how it would sound, either.

That was when a woman in a cardigan stamped into the lounge and cleared her throat near the exit. “Hello, everyone,” she called. Tim looked at her and saw there were tears in her eyes. “There’s been a report—on CNN. Fox News has it as well. It’s.” She cleared her throat again. “It’s in Seattle.”