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be-careful-what-you-wish-for saying.
    I asked for a distraction?
    Sure, the Universe responded. Here’s a doozy.
    As these things so often do, it started out simply enough, with me heading down to the lobby of my apartment building that afternoon to pick up my mail.
    My unemployment check was there, and for that, I was grateful. I set it on my dining room table, where I could admire it, and promised myself a trip to the bank first thing the next day. A couple other things arrived along with the check, including a box wrapped in brown paper, a couple advertising flyers, a card from my mom in Florida, and…
    A postcard fluttered out of the pile and hit the floor and I bent to pick it up and froze, pikestaffed by the photograph that was looking up at me.
    “Dan!” I scrambled for the postcard and the photo of Dan Cal ahan, brainiac scientist, paranormal investigator, husband of the late Madeline who, as it turned out, was a ghost who stole my body for a while and used it to get her jol ies with him when those jol ies should have been mine.
    Shaggy-haired, cute-as-a-button Dan smiled back at me.
    Let’s face it, I’m not usual y unhinged by cute.
    After al , I’m used to Quinn, who’s got the whole gorgeous thing down pat, is as hot as freshly poured Boule espresso, and packs as much of a punch (both literal y and figuratively). Normal y, just looking at Dan wouldn’t have made my knees weak and my hands shake. Chalk it up to the stress of the last few months. And to surprise, of course. The last I’d heard from Dan, he was heading to England to delve into some woo-woo mystery or another and drown his sorrows about finding out his late wife was real y a scumbag murderer.

    Knees shaking and hands trembling, I dropped down on the couch and flipped over the card, ful y expecting some foreign postmark. It looked like a lot had happened since that winter in Chicago a couple years earlier; the card came from New Mexico.
    “Going to be in Cleveland in a few weeks.” Out loud, I read the message written in his loose, scrawling handwriting, and the prospect of seeing Dan again shivered in my words. “    ‘I’ve got some exciting news to share. Let’s plan to get together as soon as I arrive.’ ”
    By the time I turned the card over again, I was smiling as broadly as Dan was in the photo. New Mexico? Maybe. I took a closer look at the photo and the sweeping panorama of mountains behind Dan, and al I could tel was that it had been taken in a place with a lot of rocks and dust. Dan, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a smudge of dirt across the front of it, was standing in front of some ruiny-looking thing, half building, half cave, that was total y nasty looking.
    His right hand was raised in a friendly greeting, and on his wrist, he was wearing a watch with a wide silver band.

    It was clearly Native American and not my style, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t intrigued as I always am by things that are pretty and valuable. I squinted for a better look at the band engraved with mysterious-looking symbols and studded with teardrop-shaped bits of turquoise.
    Southwestern, certainly. New Mexico.
    But coming to Cleveland.
    Soon.
    As distractions went, this was a pretty good one, and I thanked the Universe appropriately even as I set the postcard against the lamp on the table next to the couch, the better to see Dan and consider what his coming to town might mean. To me. To my future.
    To my Gift.
    It’s not like we’re a couple or anything. I need to make that perfectly clear.
    Pepper Martin and Dan Cal ahan had never been anybody’s idea of a pair.
    Not official y, anyway.
    There was a time, and a place, and one brief shining moment when I think that was actual y meant to be, in spite of the fact that when we first met, al Dan wanted was the chance to study my brain and Dan wanted was the chance to study my brain and figure out how my Gift worked. But then Madeline swooped in and took over my body, and the golden