It takes her two and a half exhibits to realize that what she hoped was him having fun in a reserved British way is actually him having an intensely average time in a reserved British way for reasons she cannot figure out.
For the next few galleries, she doubles down. She makes a gigantic deal of stepping over the red lines that mark each of the five mass-extinction events. She slithers over a vertiginously transparent ocean floor filled with bright orange sea bugs.
He smiles at her antics, but he hardly glances at the exhibits, even the world-famous Borealopelta and its mummified coral-pink skin.
Ripley finally cracks in Dinosaur Hall among the reproductions posed in lifelike arrangements. The joy she was hoping for is hard for her to grasp when he’s so obviously unmoved.
“Are you worried we’re going to get caught?”
He looks at her like she’s unhinged. “Erm, yes?”
“You can relax. We won’t.”
“You sound lamentably confident.” He stares longingly at a pair of maroon doors markedEmergency Exit Only. Opening Door Sounds Alarm.
“J.D. will check his messages as soon as he opens his eyes, because his phone habits are as unhealthy as everyone else’s. He’ll haul ass to sneak us out. If he doesn’t make it, we’ll stand on the toilets in the family bathroom until opening, then blend in with the crowd. This isCanada,” she emphasizes. “Nothing bad is going to happen to us. Here, I’ll take a picture of you next to the Camarasaurus tibia. If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s roughly the size of the stick up your ass.” She gestures for him to stand next to the six-foot-tall shinbone.
“No, thank you. I can take your photo if you’d like.” His face is politely implacable. She wants to punch him right in the manners.
Ripley bounces up the stairs for the photo. She waits until he’s about to tap the button, then makes the least serious face possible.
Joy,damn it.
She takes the phone from James’s unenthusiastic grip. “I look great! I didn’t know I could do that with my tongue. Oh! Ornitholestes,” she crows, running over to one of her favorite bird ancestors.
At last, the start of a smile plays at the edge of his mouth. “You’re very hard to resist when you get going, Ripley Adams. Did you know that?”
“I don’tget going,” she says, side-eyeing him.
“You do.” He strolls over to the stump of a tree-size cycadeoid with a suggestively bitten-off shape, as if the nearby Camarasaurus took a big bite. “You love museums a great deal, obviously.”
“I love them a normal amount,” she says, a little defensively. “And you were the one hyping London’s Natural History Museum. You probably go there every week.”
There’s a brief, unreadable flash in his eyes. “I don’t find the time to go very often, no.”
Ripley gapes at him. “I’m sorry, but the Natural History Museum might be paleontology’s holiest site. Their collections survived the London Blitz. Some of the specimen cards have Charles Darwin’sactual handwritingon them. To walk through those doors is to have ascended, James.”
For the briefest moment, his shoulders roll forward as if his stomach hurts. Just as quickly, some unseen hand finds the vulnerable curve of his back and pushes it straight. “It’s different for you.”
“How?”
James gestures around him. “Ripley. You literally got down on the floor with the marellomorphs. I am constantly bracing myself for the moment you step over the ropes and examine the tyrannosaur skulls for evidence of juvenile face biting. I’ve never been this enthused about dinosaurs. At any age.”
“But…isn’t that why your parents encouraged you to pursue paleontology?”
“Ilikeddinosaurs. Most children do. But Ilovedfantasy novels and the Lord of the Rings movies and organizing my pencils by hardness. If I was interested in fossils, it was only insofar as they inspired mythical lore. Dragons. Griffins. Sea serpents.”
He turns away from Dinosaur Hall and heads back to a cluster of blown-glass invertebrates mounted on the ceiling. Themuseum’s art installations seem to catch his interest, now that she thinks about it.
“So why didn’t you pursue art? You must know your drawings are amazing, James.”
He fixes his eyes on the stream of bright fish, sea urchins, and anemones. “My mum loved chemistry. Thirty-odd years ago, a professorship was a long shot for women, especially if they were married and had children. She might have managed it yet, but she joined my dad’s lab.
“Dad adored falling for brilliant women. Love hit him like a thunderbolt, he said. Nothing he could do but follow his heart. And if their—I believe your dad would call it ashotgun wedding—destroyed the success and accomplishments he’d been smitten with in the first place, he could simply start over with someone new.”
Ripley feels a surge of kinship with James’s mother. Some things haven’t changed much for women in science. “That was Linus?”
“Thatwasme,” he replies coolly, turning toward the lobby. “Linus and Marie’s mother was his first wife. My mum was rather the villain in their story. It didn’t make for a close sibling relationship.” He quirks his mouth in anOh, wellshape, but Ripley doesn’t see the same casual indifference in his eyes.
