Although Zann usually loved shopping, she didn’t love shopping with her father. The man could spend half an hour looking at ties, comparing colors and prints. A tie is a statement, he said. He was fixated on the ability of the tie to deliver a subliminal message about power and influence or whatever, so every tie had to be compared to every other tie to determine what message it would send and whether that was a message he wanted to send.

As Zann’s eye wandered the rest of the store, looking for something, anything, of interest, she spotted Charlie Peters walking toward a nearby register with a dress shirt in his hand. She headed toward him. “Hey, Charlie,” she called.

Charlie turned toward her with something like panic in his eyes.