"Month" by Deirdre. This is my new all-time favorite Deirdre story. Remember the movie "Indecent Proposal"? Well, Deirdre ups the ante. A supermodel is offered $10 million for a single month of unspecified work. She figures the work must have something to do with sex, and so says she's not interested. When the person making the offer persists, she tells her manager to call his bluff by making a counter-offer of $50 million. To her amazement, her counter-offer is accepted. The deal is this: she will be flown to an island at a secret location and will stay there for a month, at the end of which she will be returned safely and uninjured to where she started. If she cannot be certified to be safe and uninjured, she will receive $200 million; otherwise she keeps just the $50 million. What the hell? says the supermodel, for that price I can do anything. And besides, what can possibly go wrong? And so she accepts the offer. Can you resist a story like that?

Deirdre is at her best in this story: an excellent setup and unpredictable twists in the plot. However, since I carefully applied Deirdre's Law (If something can go wrong, it will go wrong; and it will involve what Senator Exon will consider to be a sexual perversion.), I felt really good about being able to predict about 78% of what happened by the time I was only 63% of the way through the story.