Dinner proceeded without incident, and for me, without meat. With Laura on my left, pressuring me to eschew (i.e., not chew) beef, chicken, pork, and shrimp in favor of tofu, I struck a compromise and ordered the spicy green beans. It wasn’t until the waiter brought the little silver tray of fortune cookies that the trouble started.

Desperately wanting something other than a green bean, I reached for the first cookie.

I dispensed with the crinkly wrapper and cracked open the smooth, crispy cookie, separating the halves, freeing the fortune. I tugged it out, suddenly craving a random, ambiguous bit of wisdom completely unrelated to Fairy Jane’s little orchestrated fairy tale. No such luck. She’d had her fingers in the cookie jar too.


An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.


My thoughts flashed with heart-wrenching images of Sean in the moments before I let him go.

Without thinking, without even considering, I dropped my cookie and its shitty fortune onto the green beans and reached for a second cookie. Wrenching that one open even faster, a woman on a mission, my eyes scanned the string of red words.


The heart is wiser than the intellect.


Fairy Jane had struck again.

“Shit!” I tossed that one down too and grabbed a third, scrabbling with the cellophane wrapper.

“Nic?” Beck sounded concerned, but right now, I couldn’t be bothered.

As I was cracking open my third cookie, I noticed Leslie’s arm snaking past the soy sauce and snaring the last one on the tray, her wrist skimming dangerously over the candle flame. I noticed, but didn’t particularly care. Right this second, it was all about the fortune I had in my hand.


Of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal.


Oooh! She was just toying with me now!

I let both fortune and cookie fall from my fingers and eyed Leslie and that last cookie, suddenly obsessed with finding one fortune that didn’t make my stomach roll with nausea. One optimistic fortune that didn’t make me cringe with regret. One whimsical, unrelated fortune that could keep me from spewing curses on the interfering, intangible head of my resident fairy godmother!

They couldn’t all be like this. There had to be at least one cookie on this table that was meant for me—one cookie to confirm that I hadn’t made a truly terrible mistake. There simply had to be.

“Give me the cookie, Leslie.”

I knew I wasn’t being polite, or even sane, for that matter. But I’d put up with a lot from Leslie, and dammit, it was my turn.

“Give me a reason,” she said with a maniacal smile, clutching the cookie like it was a grenade, and she was about to lose it. Her mind, I mean.

I took a deep breath and then another. In this semirelaxed state of pseudo calm, I figured it couldn’t hurt to come clean. “I just want to read the fortune.”

“What’s wrong with all the other ones?” she asked, gesturing to the cookie carcasses strewn across my plate.

“They’re not mine,” I told her, feeling like an idiot but unwilling to back down. The woman was holding my fortune hostage, and she was pissing me off.

Laura’s eyes were flicking between my face and the discarded little fortunes, and I could tell she was itching to ask why not. Beck was agog and very likely wondering if Fairy Jane had gotten to the cookies before I did.

“Why is that?” The epitome of polite, Leslie was either trying to talk me down off my personal ledge or else she was just desperate for a cookie. I’d say it was fifty-fifty.

“They just aren’t,” I said. “Just give me the cookie. I’ll open it and hand you back the pieces.”

“Why don’t I open the cookie and hand you the fortune?” Rarely one for a compromise, Leslie was clearly digging deep.

“Because it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just hand over a fortune—they’re not transferable.” It occurred to me that I was digging myself a hole.

Leslie stared pointedly at the crumbled pile in front of me.

“Well, then what are you going to do with those?”

Dropping my gaze from its lock with hers, I eyed the votive candle positioned between us, in the center of the table. I’d never been the sort of person who burned things, and even in my current wacko mind-set, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be that person, but desperate times ...

Luckily, Leslie offered to make a deal.

“Tell you what,” she said, holding the still-wrapped cookie between thumb and forefinger, positioning it temptingly at eye level. “I’ll trade you the fortune in this cookie for the other three.” Pointing to the mess on my plate, she added, “I get to keep the cookie.” Her gaze shifted to mine. “Deal?”

I spared a moment to glance around the table, cringing inwardly, before eventually turning back to my plate. The reject fortunes were arrayed on top, barely stained with spicy sauce.

“Fine,” I agreed, gathering the slips. I extended both hands, being careful of the candle. The fortunes were in my left hand, closed inside my fist, and my right hand was open, waiting for Leslie to drop the cookie into my palm.

She let her hands hover over mine, her fingers primed to grab the fortunes at precisely the same moment she relinquished the cookie. The exchange went without a hitch, the cookie dropping cleanly into my palm and the fortunes quickly, greedily gathered into hers.

I felt calmer the instant I had the cookie in my hot little hand. But still riding a desperate streak, I figured it couldn’t hurt to harness the power of positive thinking. Closing my eyes, I inhaled a deep, cleansing breath and imagined the fortune I’d like to see:


Congratulations, your instincts are dead-on.


Admittedly, that would have been the ideal fortune in this situation, but having selfishly seized and strip-searched every last cookie on the table, I was finally getting the fact that these were just random fortunes. It was sheer coincidence that we’d ended up with these particular four—it meant nothing. Except that Fairy Jane had turned me into a superstitious wacko.

And yet ... at this very moment, wacko or not, it meant everything.

With considerably more intense concentration than a cellophane-wrapped cookie should merit, I ripped into it, while at the edges of my peripheral vision, Laura, Beck, and Leslie perused my rejects. But as I cracked open that last cookie, all eyes were on me, waiting to see how I might react. With my pulse pounding insistently in my ears, I pulled the fortune from its cookie confines and smoothed it open between my thumbs and forefingers.

My eyes scanned the words, tumbling them out of order, and leaving me with a nonsensical jumble. It was possible too that my synapses were sluggish and out of sorts and were refusing translation. Blinking rapidly, I tried again.


Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

H. L. Menken


Everything fell away but that misshapen parallelogram of paper—the fourth in a series—that read like a message from above ... or beyond. Was it possible I was reading too much into these trite little sayings? That I was letting my obsession with Sean and his abrupt departure, not to mention Fairy Jane’s involvement, twist words and meanings in my mind? Was there a chance I was seeing hidden meaning where there was none? Or had Fairy Jane’s magic wand truly extended into innocent little cookies?

I would have killed for the ever-popular, always ridiculous You love Chinese food fortune right about now.

I could feel the regret starting to close in, its clammy hold grasping at everything. It came over me with the stunning power of a tidal wave, and its undertow was brutal. I regretted ever trusting in a magical journal, letting my guard down with Sean and then yanking it back up at the worst possible moment. And I regretted tearing into all four fortune cookies and the fact that I was now going to be subjected to a sympathetic but rousing pep talk when all I wanted was to slink away on my own, curl into a ball, and decide what to do.

Because clearly, I had to do something.

“It’s only a fortune, Nic.” Laura’s voice was quiet, soothing.

“Well, four,” Leslie clarified. “Pretty big coincidence, if you ask me.” Judging by the quirk of her lips, Leslie was both impressed and befuddled by the whole situation.

Wrinkling her nose a little in consideration, Beck suggested, “Maybe today holds some sort of astrological significance for you.”

“Like sexy planet rising over shy and quiet little moon?” Leslie cackled at her own joke, earning herself a collection of dirty looks from the rest of us. “What? I think writing horoscopes could be a blast.”

“I’ve known him less than a week.” The words came tumbling out, and I was too overwhelmed to stop them. “I wasn’t looking for anyone and certainly not him, but he charmed his way in. He made me imagine how it could all, just possibly, work out, and I just followed trustingly along.” My shoulders slumped in remembered defeat. “But then it became an international incident. If I were to go for it now, I’d have to contend with airlines, passports, customs, time zones, exorbitant cell phone charges, driving on the wrong side of the road, incessant drizzle ...”

“Pick me up a couple Toblerones and a bottle of Scotch whisky at duty-free.” I shifted my gaze to Leslie, marginally derailed. “When you get it all worked out,” she clarified.

“I like to stop at the duty-free shop.” The little Seinfeld ditty was Beck’s contribution to the muddle.