’ I paused and almost instantly Samantha’s head came up to look closely at me once again. ‘There is a ‘but’ in this isn’t there?’ I smil...d and continued. ‘More like self imposed rules. I own that body. You simply look after it for me so that I can use it whenever I wish. That means no men or women in your life. You cannot seek relief from anything other than with your hands. You will use pads rather than tampons from now on. The only male that gets his hands on your body other than me is Doc. In the past four years, it’s been nose-to-grinding-wheel for yrs. truly. Consequently, I am probably due for another well-deserved promotion. Overdue, almost certainly because the agency’s owners, my mother and Auntie Pru, don’t want to be accused of napa ... nepo ... something-ism, you know the word.My first major career move launched me from the mailroom to the number three exec in Digital Filing. Then, over the years, after a couple of people left and another one retired, I rose to Assistant. It was a war between two sides of an internal conflict. It was brother against brother like the Solomon solution to dividing up the baby. Only in this case, the baby was real and the demarcation line was the Mason-Dixon Line between two separate worlds of the same formerly united nation.I quickly initialed the place indicated by the Sergeant's big ugly thumb and got back into the ranks hoping to stay unnoticed for the time being. It was strange for me to be in such a place and watching history. For all the fun I had enjoyed in the ensuing months, though, true love had continued to elude me. That was perhaps just as well, for I had been able to empathise with Irene when she needed it the most that fall. After all she and Elizabeth had done to help me through the dark days of the previous spring, I was very relieved, in a sense, to be able to return the favour. None of us were terribly surprised that Irene and Benjamin’s relationship had failed to survive. It had clearly been in.