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signed. If both of us remained civil with each other and addressed those obligations like adults, we’d save ourselves a lot of grief and legal fees, not to mention spare our child any more fodder for future therapy sessions than she already had.
    Melody didn’t have the same obligations toward me, and I was fine if she didn’t want me in her life. As long as she treated Samantha well, and according to Samantha, Melody was nice but “she’s not you, Mom,” I was fine not having to interact with her.
    So—why had I agreed to shadow her? Possibly for days, until her stalker showed up?
    Oh, yeah. That’s right. Because I was trying to be friends with my ex, and he needed a friend.
    In the cold light of day, now that I was actually doing the job, I wasn’t so sure about the whole sap thing.
    I sighed and tried to get comfortable. World’s Biggest Sap was currently melting in the front seat of her car which was parked down the street from a trendy cafe on California Avenue a few blocks away from where Norton Greenburger had his office. Melody was inside the cafe having lunch.
    The cafe probably had air conditioning. I’d cracked the windows in my car, but I was still sweltering.
    She’d gone in the cafe alone, and I couldn’t see through the cafe’s front windows, so I had no clue who she was having lunch with. She could have made my job a little easier if she’d decided to eat at one of the little two-person tables on the sidewalk in front of the cafe, but then again, she might have spotted me just sitting in my car. I’d take what I could get.
    I settled in for the wait with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d brown bagged that morning.
    Forty-five minutes later she came out the front door and headed toward the little parking lot on the side of the cafe. She was still alone, which seemed odd to me. If she’d met someone for lunch, wouldn’t they have all come out together?
    Less than a minute after Melody left the cafe, a man walked out. Like Melody, he was alone. He wouldn’t have caught my attention except for the fact that he didn’t immediately head toward the parking lot or down the street in the opposite direction, like he was heading toward a car parked on the street.
    No, this man just stood on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.
    I wasn’t the only one who must have thought that was weird. An older guy sitting alone at one of the outside tables looked up from his tablet and frowned. He’d been eating his lunch in solitary silence, alone with whatever was on his tablet. I hoped it was a good book. I read a lot myself, but so far I stuck to books of the dead tree variety.
    The man who’d disturbed Reader Guy’s lunch had a cell phone in one hand. While he might have looked like he was checking messages, it was clear, even from my vantage point, that he was faking it.
    What he was really doing was watching Melody.
    Hello, stalker suspect.
    I grabbed my camera. It’s a small digital model, but it’s got a built-in zoom that makes the clunky zoom lens on my ancient 35mm camera look like the Hubbell telescope in comparison. I steadied the camera on my steering wheel and zoomed in on the guy, and he jumped into high definition on the display on the back of the camera.
    He was tall and trim with an athletic build—sturdy shoulders, narrow waist, lean legs. He had dark hair cut moderately short in a style that made me think lawyer or banker, and he was wearing a conservative dark suit that could have put him squarely in either profession.
    I estimated his age at somewhere in his thirties—the little screen could only show me limited details, so I’d have to enlarge the pictures on my computer later if I wanted to check for crow’s feet or fine lines around his eyes and mouth. He was clean shaven and wore his tie snugged up tight even though the temperature outside was in the middle nineties.
    I clicked off a few pictures while he stood on the sidewalk outside the cafe staring after Melody. He