With a contented smile on his face, Niles removed the rubber band from the morning edition of the Seattle newspaper. It was rare that he found such excitement in the newspaper, unless it was the anticipation of reading the latest review of a play or an opera. But since that fateful Sunday morning that he'd spent with an angel at Frasier's his life had changed. He quickly unfolded the paper, his hands rapidly thumbing through the sections until he found what he was in search of.
He smiled as he pulled the section away from the rest of the paper and unfolded it. His eyes quickly scanned the colorful pages until he found the one thing that he was most looking foreword to reading. There in the top left hand corner was the comic strip that made him smile; Caroline in the City.

Before that fateful Sunday morning, he'd paid no mind to the comic pages whatsoever. But Daphne had changed all of that. At once the memory came back to him like a ray of sunshine on a gloomy day.

He'd stopped by for a visit, claiming that he wanted to talk to his brother, but really he had only wanted to see Daphne. As luck would have it, Frasier had gone for a run with a downstairs neighbor, leaving Niles alone with the woman he loved. She offered him breakfast and he immediately accepted. Who better to share his Sunday morning with?

As he sipped his coffee, she emerged from the kitchen and went to him, holding the comic pages in her hand. But instead of a smile, she wore a puzzled expression. When he asked what was troubling her, she'd responded with a question, asking for his opinion on a comic strip known as Caroline in the City.

"It just doesn't make any sense!" She'd remarked, moving toward him to show him what she was talking about.

Curious, he took the paper from her and read the strip for himself. One glance at it and he'd laughed out loud. It was, quite possibly, one of the funniest things he'd ever read. He wanted so much to explain it to her, for he knew that she was confused, but he couldn't do it. It was clearly written from a man's point of view in such a way that a woman couldn't possibly understand. He wanted to say something to this effect, but doing so would have only hurt her feelings and made her angry. And hurting her was the last thing he wanted to do. He couldn't figure out why the comic strip was written in such a manner, when it was, in fact, credited to a woman, a Caroline Duffy. But then again, he was no expert on comic strips. He wasn't even a novice.

On this particular day, the strip had returned to what Niles assumed was its' normal format, written from a woman's perspective. He'd grown quite accustomed to it, actually and found that he enjoyed the strip very much. He'd been reading it for weeks in the hopes that he'd soon have something to share with Daphne. They were so vastly different in personalities, that finding things in common was rare. But this… a simple series of panels drawn with ink, had transformed his life into something wonderful.