During the next few days, my mind kept going through various scenarios that could explain the pictures. I thought first a sister, no he knew both, a cousin possibly but I still needed to figure out why I had the pictures. I thought that I was coming up with a plausible story when my sister mentioned to me that she had talked to Sam a few weeks ago. She said he sounded a bit lonely and they talked a bit and he wanted to know if she still had that lovely necklace that he and his wife had given to her.

The boutique on Merchant Street is narrow and well-lit, the kind of place that knows what it's doing without announcing it. I hold the door for Emily. We go in.

A woman looks up from behind the counter - fifties, unhurried, the competence of someone who has been doing this for a long time. Name tag says Maria. She looks at me the way Carol at Target looked at me - the brief professional read, taking in the situation, filing it.

"Mike?" she says.

"Yeah," I say.

"Come on back."

---

I grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s as part of Generation X. Looking back, high school was one of the most confusing periods of my life, and the effects of that confusion still influence my relationships today.

I was transgender, although I didn't have a word for it back then. The vocabulary simply wasn't part of my world. I didn't know there were other people who felt the way I did, and I certainly didn't know that what I was experiencing had a name. All I knew was that I desperately wanted to be a girl, yet every mirror reminded me that everyone else saw me as a boy.

As I said, it started with the loss of the USB stick. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for me I did not notice that it was missing from my computer bag until I received that fateful email. Upon opening the email I saw it was a message from Sam asking if I had left behind a USB stick. At first it didn’t occur to me what it was, but a quick look into my bag showed me that I had left the one that had the pictures on it at his place. I surmised that he probably found it while cleaning the room.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

It's time for the showdown between Martin and Sheila, and the Italian mob of Washington D.C. But Sheila has learned a few tricks in the course of this case, and they might stay with her for her the whole rest of her career.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

Split Victory

© 2026 Zoe Taylor

In which Tiffany first learns more about her future rival, completely unaware that Morgan, 'The Untouchable Tiger' is her own twin sister, Liberty Styles is befuddled by the humble salad fork, and Morgan finally sees her dojo and her fellow students as they are, rather than as background furniture, as she learns to see herself for who she is as well.

“You want me to do what?”

Danny stared at Zoe across the small café table, his cappuccino frozen halfway to his lips. At five-foot-six with a slim, almost delicate build, Danny had never been the adventurous type. That had always been Zoe’s department.