“Why don't you mind your own fucking business?" I snapped. "If I want to take my sister to my place of business, that's my own damned business and not any of your business." Was I overusing the word business? Fuck it. "So mind your own business.”

“Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?”“Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and alive Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-suckingleech when I was minding my own business in the past.”“Don’t you call me dim!”“Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began.“Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Helpme out.”“Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husbandthat you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.”“I was getting to it,” I whined.“Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternalnuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!”“An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing myhusband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum.“—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?”“You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.”Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned.”

“Getting back to the issue of the child," Tina said, harshing our buzz as visual, "I really think you should reconsider. He—"The phone rang. She picked it up, glanced at the caller ID."We're kind of busy," I said, a little sharply. The phone was a whole thing between Tina and me."But—""If it's important, they'll call back.""But it's your mother."I practically snarled. The phone, the fucking phone! People used it the way they used to use the cat-o'-nine-tails. You had to drop everything and answer the fucking thing. And God help you if you were home and, for whatever reason, didn't answer. "But I called!" Yeah, it was convenient for you so you called. But I'm in the shit because it wasn't convenient for me to drop everything and talk to you, on the spot, for whatever you needed to talk about.”

“Fredrika Bimm, what do you think you're doing?""Freaking out. Losing my mind. Thinking about snapping your husband's spine. Squashing the urge to vomit. Wishing I had died at childbirth.""Oh, you say that when you don't get a prize in your Lucky Charms.”

“Maybe you should mind your own business.''You are my business. My job. You are what I do.' I whipped around to face him. 'Well if I'm your job, your fired. You creep me out.”

“I—I adore you, too. Well, I don't know if I adore you. That's not really the word I'd use. But I—I—" I managed to wrench it out. God, this was hard! "I love you.""Of course you do," he said, totally unsurprised."WHAT? I finally tell you my deepest, most personal feelings and you're all, 'Yeah, I already got that memo'? This, this is why you drive me nuts! This is why it's so hard to tell you things! I take it back.”

“It's none of his business.""You are my business. I made you my business. I want you to be my business.”