“So what’s eating you?” Anette asked Tori from the other side of the table. Tori looked up at her, eyes heavy and body racked with exhaustion after the events of the day.

“Are we having dinner?” Tori asked quietly, ignoring Anette’s question.

“Pot roast,” Anette said simply. “What’s eating you?”

"Here's the thing, Merope," Agent Kirchmeyer said.
"If we take what you said at face value, what do we have? Something about cylinders.
We don't know what these cylinders are. Frankly, they sound like rolls of money.
Which, of course, is nice for him, but not really remarkable,
if you know anything about the Switcher."

Authors Note: This story is complete and sitting on my hard drive. The novel is 49,188 words long in twenty chapters. I will be posting two chapters per week, roughly 5,000 words per post, on Fridays.

Alex comes home one day and his wife, Carrie, tells him of a problem in Mike and Lisa's marriage. Mike is his best friend since middle school. It seems that Lisa caught Mike cross-dressing and came unglued. She had come to Carrie looking for solace and support for divorcing Mike. But Carrie told her about a Phil Donahue show she'd seen as a teenager featuring married cross-dressers and said that cross-dressing really was no big deal.

Lisa was offended that Carrie wouldn't back her up and said, "If it was your husband, you wouldn’t think it was so cool," and left in a snit; part of her anger now directed at Carrie.

Carrie, on the fly, hatches a plan to help Lisa see that if it was her husband, she'd still think it was no big deal. Alex somewhat reluctantly goes along with it and discovers things about himself that he never knew existed.

Chapter 17

We spent most of the afternoon discussing the songs we would be dropping and the ones that would make up the core of Sisters shows. Many staying were already classed as Pixie hits. We could build on that and cement the move with our next album.

We got the amps turned on and just played the things we liked for an hour or so. We then had a short discussion on why Josie left and the effect that had on all of us. The fact that she hadn’t been on stage for some months had helped lessen the damage to the band as a whole.