James emerges from his cabin, blinking at the sudden shot of afternoon sunlight. With the summer semester at Berkeley winding up and the APS conference fast approaching, he’s increasingly occupied with ridiculous details. Yesterday, he fielded three calls about whether the poster boards for the undergraduateresearch competition should be set up in a north–south direction, to facilitate traffic from the escalators, or east–west, to encourage more people to take the stairs. Today he’s scrambling to find a replacement for a workshop whose facilitator contracted malaria and is currently hospitalized in São Paulo. She hasn’t seen him touch his sketchbook for weeks.
He’s also dealing with the arrangements for Beauty and Beast—custom shipping containers with molded inserts, packing by bonded professionals, specialized air freight. The fossils will go straight from the Bozeman airport scanner into the custody of a preservationist from Oxford and a representative sent by the sponsor, both of whom will personally accompany them overseas.
It makes sense that a British donor would want the bones cleaned and studied at Oxford. Ripley just didn’t expect them to be so far away. She’s never excavated something without participating at least a little in its preparation.
It feels like sending her children away with strangers.
James must have sensed that when he told her, because he took her in his arms, twisting his fingers into her braid. “It’s the best-case scenario for the birds, my darling. Oxford will do a top job with the cleaning, and I’ll be close by.”
That’s a comforting thought, at least: James with the bones, and the bones with James. He’ll stop by and touch them the way he touched the specimens at the Clever Girl Museum. If it can’t be her under his hands, he’ll at least feel her in Beauty’s curves and dips.
And she’ll feel better once the scan results are in her inbox and the fossils are in international airspace, away from Will’s drones and veiled threats.
Across the clearing, Griff spies James and walks over to sayhello, a small wooden crate tucked under one arm. The two of them bend their heads over whatever’s inside, taking turns poking it and sharing their observations.
“What have they got?” Ripley asks.
“Who knows?” Cara says, shaking her head. “They’re like a pair of five-year-olds. Yesterday, I caught Griffin teaching James all his coolest fireman carries. Today it’s ‘Look what I found in the rubbish pile!’ ‘Totally disgusting, old chap.’ ‘You mean totallycool,’ ” she says, supplying imaginary dialogue.
“I hate to say it, but your terrible Australian accent turned into a terrible Jamaican accent there at the end.”
Cara crosses her arms, frowning in Griff’s direction. “Good thing I’ll be getting some practice this winter when we go visit his family.”
“Oh,” Ripley says, surprised. “I thought the two of you were going to be based here.”
“We are, but he had an attack of domesticity.” She sighs. “First he wanted to talk about kids, then it was like,Well, what about the seven generations ofmyfamily,and it all snowballed. We’ll probably end up spending a chunk of every year there. The time change is so brutal, there’s no point in going for less than a month.”
If you want children, Ripley,James’s voice whispers in her mind.
She pushes down the envy. She’s happy for Cara and Griff, truly. James doesn’t want her to wish for his children.
“How will that work when Geraldine wants to retire?”
“I have no idea,” Cara says, hands on her hips. “I thought I’d end up with someone local who loves ranching. He’d run Yellowtail, I’d run Clever Girl, and everything would be easy.” She heaves another sigh. “Instead I fell for Griff, and everything will be hard, and love is shit.”
“Yeah. You got that right.”
Cara gives her an assessing look. “And how’s it going with that one?” She tilts her head at James.
“The usual,” Ripley says, rolling her eyes. “He doesn’t want us to fall in love, and he definitely doesn’t want to say the L-word. He can’t leave Oxford; I can’t leave Montana. Love is shit.”
“Such shit.” Cara loops her arm around Ripley’s waist and squeezes.
Ripley puts her arm through Cara’s, so they’re crisscrossed and bound up together. “It’s really good shit, though.”
Cara’s wild, wide-open laugh draws Griff’s gaze, then James’s. Ripley watches James noticing the tenderness between Cara and Griff, the promise in their linked eyes, the softening of their body language. He looks over to Ripley, and she knows he must see in her what she sees in him: love for their friends; pain for themselves.
She smiles at him as best she can. She’s got two more weeks of him.
She’s going to do her utmost not to let time steal her joy.
34
August 19:
Nine Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
The helicopter is overkill for a specimen of Beast’s size, but according to the specialty-equipment-rental company, the dirt road is too soft for a backhoe.
