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      DELAYED.

      DELAYED.

      DELAYED.

      “Come on,” Julia Radman murmured as she scanned the hard-to-read rows of flights. “Don’t be—”

      CANCELED.

      Of course.

      With a sigh, Julia shrugged the strap of her leather bag higher on her shoulder and looked at the line of people queuing in front of the customer-service desk. None of them looked any happier than she did. Julia glanced at her watch, then at the line, and finally outside the terminal windows to the late-afternoon sun shining as golden as honey. The weather in Texas might be hot and dry, but apparently the entire East Coast was being slammed by an ice storm. Newark, JFK, Philadelphia—nobody was getting in or out.

      She might as well sit down. She wasn’t going anywhere, not for a while, and standing in line wasn’t going to make the time pass any faster. She settled into one of the curved plastic chairs close enough to the desk so she could see what was going on and pulled out her iPhone to let her fingers dance over the keys. She pulled up Hobby Airport’s Web site, but there wasn’t anything there she didn’t already know. They had a nice slideshow of planes landing and taking off, but after those three minutes of her life had gone by, she had nothing to do but check the weather. Fifteen minutes later the line hadn’t moved much at all, and the rest of the plastic seats had filled with disgruntled and grumbling passengers.

      “You too, huh?”

      The seat next to her had been empty for a few minutes, but now a heavyset man in a long overcoat had taken it. She’d already moved over as far as she could, and he huffed a little as, he squirmed into the space between Julia and the woman on his other side.

      “Where you headed?” the man continued as though she’d answered.

      “Philadelphia.”

      “Newark,” he told her. “Got my wife waiting for me. Grandkids, too, prolly.”

      “That’s nice,” Julia said. The only thing waiting for her would be a pile of mail, a cold apartment and a goldfish named Larry.

      The man sighed heavily. “I only got a coupla more years before I can retire. Let someone else take over, ya know? I’m tired of all this traveling.”

      “Especially when it’s like this.” Julia nodded sympathetically.

      She loved traveling, actually. Business or pleasure, she spent hours planning her trips to take advantage of local sights. She wasn’t going to end up like her parents, who always talked about the vacations they wanted to take but who’d never gone farther than Niagara Falls—the American side! The weather was making this trip inconvenient, but she wasn’t going to swear off traveling because of it.

      The line had inched forward, people peeling away from it with angry faces. The ticket clerks looked harried, tight-lipped smiles giving the minimum of polite, forced cheer. Julia didn’t envy them their jobs at the moment.

      “You been up there yet?” The man jerked his double chin toward the desk.

      “No. You?”

      “Yeah. Don’t look good, ya know? They told me I could sit and wait or I could take a flight out tomorrow. They’ll put me up in the airport hotel. Hilton, they said. But I tole ‘em, I wanna get home, ya know?”

      Julia shifted in her seat to look at him. “You’re going to wait?”

      He nodded. “See if Newark opens up. They say I got a coupla hours to wait. Might as well, ya know?” His hearty chuckle sounded forced and his red-rimmed eyes held no hint of humor.

      Julia looked at the line and decided it was still too long to wait. “If they offer me a free night at the Hilton, I’ll take it.”

      “You don’t got nobody waiting for you at home?” The man frowned. “Pretty girl like you? That’s a shame.”

      Julia looked down at her hands, folded loosely in her lap. “Thanks.”

      There didn’t seem to be much else to say to that. He was only trying to be nice, and she didn’t really want to get into her personal life with a stranger. How she was single by choice, not for lack of offers; how she’d decided it was better to be alone than settle for something that didn’t make her happy.

      “My Maggie, now, if I’m away from her for more than a few days, I miss her something awful. And I been away for a week this time. We got the grandkids coming to stay with us over Christmas break on account our daughter and her husband are going to Mexico. You ever been to Mexico?”

      “Yes. It’s nice.”

      “Nice, huh?” Her newfound friend looked dubious. “I can’t even eat Mexican food. Messes with my stomach. But I can’t wait to see the kids, ya know? They been there two days awready.”

      “I’m sure they’ll get you home as soon as they can,” Julia assured him.

      He didn’t look convinced. “Yeah. I hope so. Well, I’m going to head over to get something to eat, I guess. You need anything?”

      “No, thanks. I’m going to wait here for the line to get smaller and see what I can do about getting out of here.”

      He nodded and heaved his bulk off the chair. “You have a safe flight, then. Hope you get home okay.”

      Even if I don’t have someone waiting for me, Julia thought as she smiled and waved goodbye. At least he hadn’t gone on and on about it, or offered her dating advice, the way the elderly woman sitting beside her on the flight out had. Or tried to fix her up with a nephew, cousin, grandson or brother-in-law. She’d had all that, too.

      What had Jane Austen said about a man of a certain age and position needing a wife? Well, Julia was of a certain age, thirty-two, and of a certain position, VP for Customer Relations at the biggest health-insurance provider in Pennsylvania, and while she sometimes thought she wouldn’t mind having a wife if that meant there would be someone to cook and clean and do her laundry, she was pretty sure she wasn’t suffering from her lack of a husband.

      Boyfriends, she’d decided, were like seashells. Every once in a while you found a pretty one to put in your pocket, but most were broken, some were sharp, some had a bad smell. Her last boyfriend had been a nice guy, a sweet guy. A spineless, couldn’t-make-a-decision-to-save-his-life sort of guy. The one before that had been the opposite, a big, brawny manly man who’d delighted in treating her like a helpless, fragile doll.

      She wasn’t opposed to dating or marriage. She just wasn’t going to hold her breath or put her life on hold until she found the One. Nor was she willing to put aside her standards for a quick fling, or to settle for a relationship just to have one rather than be alone, the way some of her friends had done.

      The line moved forward slowly, each person seemingly needing a long, long time to get their arrangements straightened out. With one eye on the line, Julia pulled out her iPhone, doubly grateful for the distraction of the Net as she browsed her favorite gossip site and checked her e-mail, then surfed over to her account on Connex, a popular social-networking site. There she played a few moves in her online version of a popular board game and checked out the updated photos on her friends list.

      The line had moved, but not much.

      Idly, she skimmed through her messages from Connex. She had the usual winks and hugs from random users who’d found her profile interesting and some friend requests she deleted. She liked Connex because the blog function allowed her to keep up with real-life friends she didn’t see often, but she wasn’t there to collect “friends” the way some people were. She never friended anyone she hadn’t met in real life. She was getting ready to disconnect,