Sam glanced down at his shirt, feigning insult. “Is the dad bod really that bad?”
“It’s not that—it’s for your health. You never know.”
“What I do know is that at my age, I seem to be almost supernaturally cursed to wear these love handles and flab. I’ve tried dieting. And exercise. The curse of the dad bod resists all earthly countermeasures.”
“Have you tried cutting out alcohol?”
Sam snorted. “I’m a widower with a teen and a pre-teen at home. By the known laws of physics and human biology, I cannot survive without alcohol.”
Adeline shook her head, feeling slightly guilty about her adolescent behavior. “Are they that bad?”
“No. In fact, there have been times when those two kids were the only thing that kept me going. They’re my life. And they’ve given my life meaning that I couldn’t have imagined before. Especially after Sarah passed.”
Those words healed a wound so deep inside of Adeline she hadn’t known it was there.
*
The following night, Nora and Adeline were sitting in her living room, sipping wine and chatting, almost the way they had so many years ago, in another place, in another time. If they were indeed ships in the night, every moment they spent together brought them closer, back to the place they were before.
“Do you know what Hiro and Elliott are doing out in the valley?” Nora asked.
“Not specifically,” Adeline lied.
“Do you know generally?”
“Generally, they’re working on their passion project.”
Nora raised her eyebrows. “Seems like the only passion projects going on in this strange oasis in the desert are obsessing over dead people.”
And Adeline thought: truer words were never spoken.
*
Adeline waited and watched the calendar until Nora’s murder was three days away. Then two.
Knowing it was coming—and that she still didn’t know who the killer was—left her with a sense of impending doom. She searched, and still there were no clues.
Hiro and Elliott had locked themselves in the lab. They were close to their discovery.
Adeline felt the two events racing toward her now, two unstoppable trains powered by the force of time, about to collide.
Constance returned from China. She was so exhausted from her trip that she stayed in bed the entire next day. She was getting sicker. For years, she had been slowly losing her battle with the disease. Now she was losing it quickly.
A black cloud hung over Sam. The anniversary of his wife’s death loomed two days away.
Adeline realized then that Nora was going to die within hours of the anniversary of Adeline’s mother’s passing. She wondered if that was significant.
*
The night before Nora’s death, Adeline barely slept. It was the same as the night Charlie passed away.
But this time, Adeline didn’t just toss and turn in bed. She stared at her phone, at the video feed of Nora’s bedroom, where she slept peacefully, not a care in the world, completely unaware that it was her last night on Earth.
She flipped to the other feeds.
Hiro and Elliott were talking in the lab, empty coffee mugs on the table, a stack of metal tuning bars scattered like an overturned box of toothpicks.
Sam was up late, reading a book by the fire, two empty beer bottles sitting on the raised hearth.
No matter how hard she looked, Adeline couldn’t find the missing piece that would solve this mystery of past, present, and future. And it was driving her crazy.
Sometime just before morning, she drifted off to sleep.
*
Adeline’s buzzing phone woke her.
Groggy, half awake, she fumbled through the covers and found it and raised it and squinted against the bright Nevada sun blazing in through the windows.
Nora was calling.
This had to be it.
Adrenaline shot through Adeline’s veins as she answered, her voice scratchy.
“Hi.”
“Hey. Can you come over?”
“Everything all right?”
“I don’t know.”
Nora sounded scared.
Adeline jumped out of bed. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
When the call ended, she checked the time.
4:38 p.m.
She had slept almost the entire day.
She opened the app for the camera feeds and clicked on the group for inside Nora’s home. She saw only black boxes. They were offline.
Why?
Fear rose inside of her. She checked the wireless access point they were connected to near Nora’s home. It was online.
They should be working.
She pulled the feeds from the cameras outside. Nora had gone for a run that morning with a friend. She followed the two women around the city, to the little café where they ordered smoothies after the run, watched them chatting and sipping as they strode home. Nora was inside almost an hour, then took a car to work, and left at lunch.