Lester had slept with more fatkins girls than she could count, women made into doll-like mannequins by surgery and chemical enhancements, women who read sex manuals in public places and boasted about their Kegel weight-lifting scores.

But when he looked at her like that, she knew that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever loved, that he would do anything for her. That he loved her as much as he could ever love anyone.

What the hell was I complaining about? she thought as he fell on her like a starving man.

She met Sammy in their favorite tea-room, the one perched up on a crow’s nest four storeys up a corkscrew building whose supplies came up on a series of dumbwaiters and winches that shrouded its balconies like vines.

She staked out the best table, the one with the panoramic view of the whole shantytown, and ordered a plate of the tiny shortbread cakes that were the house specialty, along with a gigantic mug of nonfat decaf cappuccino.

Sammy came up the steps red-faced and sweaty, wearing a Hawai’ian shirt and Bermuda shorts, like some kind of tourist. Or like he was on holidays? Behind him came a younger man, with severe little designer glasses, dressed in the conventional polo-shirt and slacks uniform of the corporate exec on a non-suit day.

Suzanne sprinkled an ironic wave at them and gestured to the mismatched school-room chairs at her table. The waitress—Shayna—came over with two glasses of water and a paper napkin dispenser. The men thanked her and mopped their faces and drank their water.

“Good drive?”

Sammy nodded. His friend looked nervous, like he was wondering what might have been swimming in his water glass. “This is some place.”

“We like it here.”

“Is there, you know, a bathroom?” the companion asked.

“Through there.” Suzanne pointed.

“How do you deal with the sewage around here?”

“Sewage? Mr Page, sewage is solved. We feed it into our generators and the waste heat runs our condenser purifiers. There was talk of building one big one for the whole town, but that required way too much coordination and anyway, Perry was convinced that having central points of failure would be begging for a disaster. I wrote a series on it. If you’d like I can send you the links.”

The Disney exec made some noises and ate some shortbread, peered at the chalk-board menu and ordered some Thai iced tea.

“Look, Ms Church—Suzanne—thank you for seeing me. I would have understood completely if you’d told me to go fuck myself.”

Suzanne smiled and made a go-on gesture.

“Before my friend comes back from the bathroom, before we meet up with anyone from your side, I just want you to know this. What you’ve done, it’s changed the world. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for you.”

He had every appearance of being completely sincere. He was a little road-crazed and windblown today, not like she remembered him from Orlando. What the hell had happened to him? What was he here for?

His friend came back and Sammy said, “I ordered you a Thai iced tea. This is Suzanne Church, the writer. Ms Church, this is Herve Guignol, co-director of the Florida regional division of Disney Parks.”

Guignol was more put-together and stand-offish than Sammy. He shook her hand and made executive sounding grunts at her. He was young, and clearly into playing the role of exec. He reminded Suzanne of fresh Silicon Valley millionaires who could go from pizza-slinging hackers to suit-wearing biz-droids who bullshitted knowledgeably about EBITDA overnight.

What the hell are you two here for?

“Mr Page—”

“Sammy, call me Sammy, please. Did you get my postcard?”

“That was from you?” She’d not been able to make heads or tails of it when it arrived in the mail the day before and she’d chucked it out as part of some viral marketing campaign she didn’t want to get infected by.

“You got it?”

“I threw it out.”

Sammy went slightly green.

“But it’ll still be in the trash,” she said. “Lester never takes it out, and I haven’t.”

“Um, can we go and get it now, all the same?”

“What’s on it?”

Sammy and Guignol exchanged a long look. “Let’s pretend that I gave you a long run-up to this. Let’s pretend that we spent a lot of time with me impressing on you that this is confidential, and not for publication. Let’s pretend that I charmed you and made sure you understood how much respect I have for you and your friends here—”

“I get it,” Suzanne said, trying not to laugh. Not for publication—really!

“OK, let’s pretend all that. Now I’ll tell you: what’s on that postcard is the financials for a Disney Parks buyout of your friends’ entire operation here. DiaBolical, the ride, all of it.”

Suzanne had been expecting a lot of things, but this wasn’t one of them. It was loopy. Daffy. Not just weird, but inconceivable. As though he’d said, “I sent you our plans to carve your portrait on the moon’s surface with a green laser.” But she was a pro. She kept her face still and neutral, and calmly swallowed her cappuccino.

“I see.”

“And there are—there are people at Disney who feel like this idea is so dangerous that it doesn’t even warrant discussion. That it should be suppressed.”

Guignol cleared his throat. “That’s the consensus,” he said.

“And normally, I’d say, hey, sure, the consensus. That’s great. But I’ll tell you, I drew up these numbers because I was curious, I’m a curious guy. I like to think laterally, try stuff that might seem silly at first. See where it goes. I’ve had pretty good instincts.”

Guignol and Suzanne snorted at the same time.

“And an imperfect record,” Sammy said. Suzanne didn’t want to like him, but there was something forthright about him that she couldn’t help warming to. There was no subtlety or scheming in this guy. Whatever he wanted, you could see it right on his face. Maybe he was a psycho, but he wasn’t a sneak.

“So I ran these numbers for my own amusement, to see what they would look like. Assume that your boys want, say, 30 times gross annual revenue for a buyout. Say that this settles our lawsuit—not theirs, just ours, so we don’t have to pay for the trademark suit to go forward. Assume that they generate one DiaBolical-scale idea every six months—” Suzanne found herself nodding along, especially at this last one. “Well, you make those assumptions and you know what comes out of it?”

Suzanne let the numbers dance behind her own eyelids. She’d followed all the relevant financials closely for years, so closely that they were as familiar as her monthly take-home and mortgage payments had been, back when she had a straight job and a straight life.

“Well, you’d make Lester and Perry very wealthy,” she said. “After they vested out, they’d be able to live off the interest alone.”

Sammy nodded judiciously. His sidekick looked alarmed. “Yup. And for us?”

“Well, assuming your last quarterly statement was accurate—”

“We were a little conservative,” Sammy said. The other man nodded reflexively.

You were very conservative, she thought. DiaB’s making you a fortune and you didn’t want to advertise that to the competition.

“Assuming that, well, you guys earn back your investment in, what, 18 months?”

“I figure a year. But 18 months would be good.”

“If you vest the guys out over three years, that means—”

“100 percent ROI, plus or minus 200 percent,” Sammy said. “For less money than we’ll end up spending on our end of the lawsuit.”

Guignol was goggling at them both. Sammy drank his Thai iced-tea, slurping noisily. He signalled for another one.

“And you sent me these financials on a postcard?”

“There was some question about whether they’d be erased before I could show them to anyone, and I knew there was no way I’d be given the chance to re-create them independently. It seemed prudent to have a backup copy.”