“Kind. Precisely,” he says. He sounds peculiar. Unsettled. They face each other for a long moment, a light breeze clattering through the aspen leaves. If he thinks she liked his touch more than she should have, it’s not obvious from here.
Finally, he says, “I wish you could take money from a university, Ripley. I could get you five offers in five minutes.”
“Yeah. I wish…” she says, not knowing where this is going. There’s a painful, fraying feeling ofwantin her chest. “I don’t know.”
“A colleague of mine in theoretical physics claims every wish is actually a wish for a time machine,” Smithson says. “If you had a time machine, where would you go, Ripley Adams?” He’s walking them back to safer emotional ground, she realizes. Giving her a dignified exit from her mini-freakout. And yet the mix of melancholy, curiosity, and affection in his words makes her shiver with a feeling she can’t name. “How many trips do I have?”
“One.”
“You have to kill Hitler if you have just one trip. I don’t make the rules.”
His lips twitch. “All right, two trips.”
Her dad, then. “There’s someone I’d go back and save. I wouldn’t miss the signs this time.”
He hums in agreement. “There’s someone I’d save too. Then,since you took care of Hitler, I’d go back to the day we spoke at the APS. I’d do that day differently if I could.”
“Me too.”
An odd expression flashes across his face, quick as lightning. “You’d prevent our meeting.”
“I’d prevent everything about that day. It was expensive and horrible and made not one bit of difference in my life.”
“It made a difference to me,” he says quietly. “You left science, Ripley. When a brilliant mind leaves the field, it’s a loss to us all. I blame myself for a good part of that.”
Right.For a second, she forgot he was all about science, and thought he might have…Forget it, Adams.“It wasn’t on you, Smithson. I got myself kicked out of UEM. On purpose.”
His brows draw down. “What?”
“Another day I should have prevented. But you know me. Never met a hill I didn’t want to die on.” She tries for a smile. Judging by his ferocious expression, she’s not doing a great job. “My prof wanted a meeting—to discuss my next paper, I thought. But Will had convinced him that the original idea for myNaturepaper was his. Dr. Ballard told me to amend the authorship—add Will and put his name first—or he’d pull the paper. I pulled it myself rather than let Will take it. And you know the rest.”
She’d been so tired the day of that meeting. She’d lain awake for hours the night before, heart pounding, waiting for Will to come home. They’d never fought like that before, much less over something so pointless. He knew she couldn’t add his name to herNaturepaper even if she’d wanted to.
It was a shock to find him in Ballard’s office. Even more of a shock when he claimed she’d stolen his idea. “You literally admitted it in the acknowledgments, Ripley. ‘Special thanks to WilliamStone for telling me I was looking in the wrong place.’ ” He’d sounded so firm that reality felt suddenly soft by comparison, bending like cheap plastic held too close to a gaslight. For a millisecond, Ripley had believed him herself. Believed Ballard when he said she had no choice but to sign the amended author page.
But Steve Adams had not raised his daughter to think she had no choices. Steve Adams had sat in the passenger seat of the Charger on Ripley’s sixteenth birthday and said, “You can’t always prevent a crash, but you can always dosomething. Gas, brakes, or steering, Pip. Pick one.”
Gas,she thought then, reaching for the signature page. “I’ll take care of it.”
Will followed her out. “Don’t make this into a big deal, Ripley. I mean, we’re over, obviously, but you still get second author.”
Something snapped in her chest. Her mom had left when Ripley wouldn’t give her career a boost. Unbelievably, Will had found a way to top that—stealing her work and leaving her anyway.
“Fuck you, you fucking thief.”
His eyes narrowed the way a man’s eyes do right before he’s about to use the wordbitch. She turned away before he could say it to her face.
Smithson nods slowly when she’s finished telling the story. The wind picks up, toying with the brim of his hat. He scans the plains, the mountains, the dig. Everything but her. “I promise I will get you that money, Ripley. Come hell or high water.”
She shakes her head. “I appreciate everything you’ve done, but we’re out of time. I’ll tell the kids tomorrow morning.”
13
June 20:
Sixty-Nine Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Smithson doesn’t go out for a ride on Saturday morning. Ripley would have heard him if he did.
