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entered her soul without knocking. She held her breath. Then he was smiling, and her heart took off, beating too fast; her nerves twitched to life under her skin. She hunched her shoulders over her desk, kept her head down in deep concentration, and tried to gather her thoughts.
    Had he seen her? Had he really smiled at her?
    “Vi?” she called out, louder than her telephone voice but not so loud as to disturb the dignified fiscal quiet maintained in the bank.
    “I saw it,” Vi whispered back loudly. “He smiled at me.” Something twisted painfully in Ellen’s chest. “Maybe I won’t have to buy that camera after all. Maybe he’ll come open an account.”
    “Maybe,” Ellen said, swallowing the envy she felt. Vi was always so confident, always so sure. Ellen should have known that smile wasn’t for her.
    She tossed the pen onto the desk and leaned back again in her chair. Why hadn’t that smile been for her? Hadn’t she reacted to it as if it had been? She turned her head to the window. The man was gone, but she could still see him standing there, smiling. She pursed her lips and her gaze meandered slowly to the bottom drawer of her desk
Determine exactly what it is you want. You can’t have your way unless you know which way you want to go. Be practical. Be realistic. Reach for the stars ... but stay in your own galaxy.
    He was definitely in her galaxy. On her planet even, earthy and human. He’d helped her with her groceries. It was possible that smile had been for her. Vi didn’t have a monopoly on happiness; she wasn’t the only one who could take what they wanted from the world. Her gaze gravitated toward the teller boxes across the room and settled on Lisa Lee, earning fifty cents more an hour in a position she was barely trained for, knowing full well that if she played her cards right, she was in line to move up the line ahead of Ellen.
    No, she wasn’t being fair.
    Lisa was a sweet girl, a Korean immigrant who’d come to Quincey with her husband to make a better life for themselves. She worked hard—on her English, in her citizenship classes, at her duties at the bank. Ellen liked her ... but ... well, the position of loan officer was in her galaxy too. She worked hard too.
    Okay. She’d had enough.
    She knew exactly what she wanted now. Change. And she was going to make it happen. Was she not the captain of her own vessel? Was it not her life to direct? Could she not create her own destiny? If being too nice was causing her to fall short of her targets, wasn’t it time to try new trajectories? Wasn’t it her responsibility, as well as her right, to make her own happiness?
    And it wasn’t the job or the money or the man—none of them in themselves had the power to make her happy—but knowing would. Knowing that she could have the promotion and the pay raise, and the man, if she wanted them—now, that would make her happy. Knowing that she could change her life, that she wasn’t a victim of fate, that being too nice was a curable disease—that would make her happy.
    She’d get a pay raise, she’d get the promotion, and she’d make that man smile at her. Her —in a way that left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to whom he was smiling at, in a significant way that would curl her toes and cause her to smile right back at him. That’s what she wanted. That would make her happy. And she had a right to be happy.
    “Vi,” she said, the wheels on her chair squeaking a little as she pushed herself away from her desk and reached into her bottom drawer for her purse.
    “Yeah?”
    “Have you ever had one of those days when your life didn’t seem to be worth living, and then something”—she held the small green booklet in both hands—“some little thing happens, and everything is different?”
    Across the street in the camera shop, Jonah Blake was contemplating the short-term emotional benefits and the long-term physical drawbacks to putting another dent in the wall with his forehead.
    He