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Carmela first heard the voice shortly before her 50th birthday.

“Aren’t you cold? Turn the heat up.”

She looked around and thought, “It’s 70 degrees in there. That’s perfectly warm. No. I’m not cold.” Still, later, at bedtime, though it was 70 in the house, she found herself underneath a blanket, sipping a cup of chamomile tea, reading a cozy mystery.

The next time she heard the voice, gently, in the back of her mind, it was telling her it was time to exchange what she thought of as her signature look of shoulder-length, curly, chestnut hair for a “sensible but cute” bob.

“Think of the prep time you’ll save,” it said. “You could exercise, or make a healthy breakfast.” And that did happen sometimes. But more often, she just slept or watched TV.

The Voice became more insistent then, until she finally gave in and turned the heat up to 72, then 74. When her husband Ron, sweating, complained, she decided to keep their electric blanket out year-round. That also created a conflict with him, so they agreed that she would use the electric blanket when she was sitting in her recliner. In bed she stuck to conventional blankets. The unexpected drawback was she then typically slept in her chair, with a cozy mystery or Sudoku book in her lap, as well as the cat.

The cat, Stinker, was growing old, and Ron had always said he preferred dogs, so on his birthday, he woke up to find he was sleeping next to his gift, a shih tzu-dachshund mix Carmela had named Bittles. Possessing the long body of a dachshund but the abbreviated face and useless mouth size of a shih tzu, Bittles was unlike any dog the couple had ever seen. An avid duck hunter, Ron said the dog was cute, but he had little use for cute, and with the tiny mouth and stubby dachshund legs, Bittles couldn’t even fetch a ball or stick. That suited Carmela just fine, and she gave Bittles enough love for both of them, spending her time engaged in her new passion of knitting and crocheting, making the dog an endless array of booties and sweaters, one for every season and occasion.

The Voice spoke loudest to Carmela when she was in her chair, with her blanket and her tea, holding Stinker while Bittles sat near her feet. When she was there, working in her puzzle books or reading about Alice Allwell, Teagarden Detective or watching TV, things seemed dreamy, and the Voice spoke right to her soul.

“Turn on ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ Don’t worry about those hard puzzles. Just watch that colorful wheel spin, spin, spin.”

“’Wheel’ is over. Put on the Hallmark Channel. Oh look! It’s Christmas in July! All Christmas movies, all the time. So warm and romantic!”

Then the Voice started making a singular demand. It was so insistent, Carmela could hardly think of anything else.

“Go to Florida. Boca Raton. It’s where you want to be. Not the panhandle. Not the Keys. West Palm, Miami, Orlando, Boca Raton. Go. Live your dreams.”

Three years later, when Ron retired, he and Carmela followed that dream, buying a condo at 1132 Sea Shell Circle, Boca Raton, FL. As she unpacked her boxes and furnished her new home, Carmela felt like she wasn’t decorating so much as becoming something new. Something she had been guided to be by the Voice. When their daughter Fiona came to visit for the holidays, Carmela was not the woman Fiona remembered and the house was not as Fiona imagined it would be.

Despite the temperature being a balmy 75 outside, with high humidity, there were no windows open, “Because the air is on,” Carmela said. She pulled her quilted housecoat tighter around her, shivering, “I don’t know how your father survives in here, it’s so cold.”

Breaking into a sweat moments after entering the stifling house, Fiona found the temperature set at 80, and the unit actually off. The Florida sun and Carmela’s oven had increased the temperature to 83.

That day and every day after, dinner was at 4:30, while breakfast the next morning was at 6. The first night, after dinner, Fiona searched the cabinets and refrigerator for something that could serve as dessert.

“Oh sweetie, I have just the thing,” Carmela said. “There’s a bowl of Jordan almonds out on the coffee table. If you don’t like those we can go to Costco and get you a bag of pastel mints tomorrow.”

At that moment, in New Jersey, a voice spoke to Harry Winfield. It said:

“Forget solid color pants. Stick with a solid shirt, but move on and expand to plaid shorts, and mix in some white leather shoes. It’s you.”