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entire situation, and then picked up her phone.
     
    “Thank you,” he said, and was grateful, not for the first time today, that the darkness of his complexion helped keep his embarrassment under wraps. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to track a woman’s phone number down. It had been ages ago, if it had ever even happened.
     
    There were a lot of reasons he’d always erred towards casual relationships over the years. A lot of them had to do with being raised with a lot of money, and seeing the number of people who became interested in his wallet more than they were with him. A lot of them had to do with a lingering sense that the faces in the parade were all somehow similar, no matter how many colors and shapes they might take. There was always the same light of avarice in the eyes, the calculated question of how far this alliance would take them. He’d filtered a lot of hassle out of his life just by telling people that he wasn’t interested in more than a casual relationship. When they opted out after that declaration—well, at least he hadn’t wasted his time.
     
    Zoey was different. Some part of it was almost certainly that he didn’t get turned down often, and it was an intriguing sensation, but there was more to it than that. She didn’t seem swayed by him. Or if she was, it was by the heat of his mouth and the strength in his fingers, not by the Amex Black he kept in his wallet.
     
    He sat down at his desk and pulled the old man’s planner out again.
     
    Philip Blankenship had been a business genius, a wild play boy, a skilled politician too smart to bother trying to make a career for himself in Washington or Albany, and every so often, a self aware and deliberate Luddite. He’d refused to write with anything other than fountain pens, and his collection was hugely varied, from maki-e pens that cost tens of thousands of dollars to cheap plastic mass manufactured pens that could be had for $15. He’d also insisted on blue ink, but he’d had every shade of blue from every major manufacturer. He’d had planners custom made for him on paper that was high enough quality that his pens wouldn’t bleed through, even when he brought out the ones with the broad or italic nibs.
     
    The daily events parts of the planner were fairly obvious. Meetings, dinners, scheduled conference calls, all the usual things that one saw in the daily schedule of a business executive. But the task list, and the space for a weekly gratitude journaling—that was where Alex was positive that something was going on.
     
    First, the task list was always written in varied shades of blue, with clearly different pens. The handwriting stayed the same from line to line, but the structure of the writing varied greatly from one nib to the next. That in and of itself wasn’t necessarily strange—one would just assume that he added tasks as he thought of them, instead of sitting down and writing out one day at a time. But each task was crossed out in the same color of ink that had been used to write it in the first place. That didn’t make sense.
     
    And then, some of the actual tasks were bizarre. Laundry , for example. Philip Blankenship hadn’t done a load of laundry in his life. Alex was fairly sure he wouldn’t have known how to operate a washing machine if someone put a gun to his head. He’d always had people to do those sorts of things. He hadn’t even bothered to pick up his own underwear from the floor. Or Meet bodega and Dancing lessons. It was clearly some kind of code.
     
    He sighed and rubbed his fingertips into his forehead. Or, a man who’d never had a good relationship with his father was finding meaning in the man’s life after his death, trying to believe that there had been something more to the man than the abusive, womanizing piece of shit he’d grown up knowing. That was probably what a psychologist would tell him. Getting one of those should probably be the next step in his ‘act like a