Placing my finger between the pages, I flipped the cover shut and showed her. “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon,” I said. I fli...ped it open again.Mom seemed impressed. Crossing her legs so that a knee showed, she said, “Wow! That’s pretty big. I’ve never read it. Any good?” She re-crossed her legs and this time a few inches of thigh were exposed.“Um, yeah, actually it is. I don’t know just how accurate he is, I mean, the forward says that a lot of what he writes is disputed,. A temple to the she-demon that her worshipers call Aphrodite.”“Sorry, Mother Valencia, but does anyone actually worship Aphrodite anymore? We wiped out the pagans fifteen hundred years ago. And I’ve been to the Islands lots of times. I’ve never seen a temple there.”“There’s no way you can see it, unless you already know it’s there. And Aphrodite has quite a following, I assure you. Her followers are not like our Lord’s. They aren’t structured, at least not the laity. One can be a worshiper of. It also makes everything damned inconvenient.I am a digital fortress, and even so, I am afraid of being spied upon. It really irritated me that in my first day at EFC, I’d found two devices set to spy on me as I worked. And I figured there would be more.I hadn’t opened email after logging on. I’d simply stared at the computer screen watching the security camera outside my office continue its 360 degree pan every four minutes. Who monitored that camera? As I left for the day, I wandered. "German," she replies."Occupation?" No, just here for a few days."I spent a couple of hours defrosting the fridge last night.Or "foreplay" as she likes to call it.I woke up this morning at 8 and could sense something was wrong.I got downstairs and found the wife face down on the kitchen floor, not breathing! I panicked. I didn't know what to do.Then I remembered "the local cafe serves breakfast until 11."Got caught having a pee in the local swimming pool today.The lifeguard shouted at me so.