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prologue
G. Muñoz,
The faint strains of a melancholic fiddle sound while I stare out my window.
The war is long and hard. I fear we might not make it through the winter on our current provisions, and I find the company tedious. I suffer in quiet indignation and hope you fare better.
End scene.
I ran the numbers again and you were right: it would be more cost effective to retrofit the Beta with lenses shipped from New York rather than having them made in-country. I’m going to have Mindy make some arrangements and get the details to you.
Lou mentioned that a position with the Geneva labs might be available soon. She asked me if I’d be interested in it and I said yes, so we won’t be stuck trading letters like antebellum lovers bent on flouting societal norms. I mean, we can’t be ruined if we are willing, right? Okay, I blame you for the way I’m talking. You made me read that romance book, and let me tell you something. It was damn good. Very spicy.
I got you the next one in the series. Check your email.
—A
P.S. If you’re up for it, I want to take you to dinner when I get to Geneva. My treat, but you get to pick the spot, so think big.
Grace tapped her fingers on the table and leaned back in her chair. She had just wandered in from a night out, and the warm buzz of the liquor she’d enjoyed hummed in her veins. It was a cool 3am in Geneva, which meant it was 10 pm or so in New York. She sighed and stretched, glancing at the timestamp on the email—twenty-two minutes ago.
That meant if she replied, like she really wanted to, she’d most likely get a response.
But should she do that, after so many gin and tonics?
Talking to Anton always made her...feel a certain type of way.A certain type of way which was in violation of more than one workplace rule. Not her work place rule, of course, because there were really only so many lines you could toe when you were enforcing OSHA safety standards every minute of every day. And speaking of time…
Her eyes went back to the clock and Grace winced. She should be asleep. She really,reallyshould be trying to get some rest, not losing her ever loving mind over an email from Anton. She looked back at his email. He wanted to go to dinner. That was harmless, right? Even if he made her feel…some type of way.
They were friends, yes, but they did work together, even if they’d neverseeneach other. For six months all of their communication had been through emails and phone calls. And those phone calls had only just begun in the last few weeks. No face-to-face for them, unless you counted the one time she’d wandered into a room while he was on a pixelated video call with her boss and best friend Lou. Grace only had time to shove a bagel into Lou’s mouth before her attention had been pulled away by a dustup between the other scientists in response to a shortage of non-latex gloves. But that was all part of her gig as lab manager.
Grace ran the lab as the head lab assistant, or Lab Queen as she preferred, to Louane Wright, world-renowned astrophysicist, and her best friend. Their friendship had sprung from mutual need when Grace had taken up the mantle of lab assistant three years earlier. Once mocked for her work on the space-time continuum, Lou became lauded as a pioneer in her field and awarded a research appointment at CERN in Switzerland. She hadn’t hesitated for a second in bringing Grace along for the ride.
It had been a dream come true. Everything had fallen into place for Grace since coming to Geneva with Lou—well,until Anton.
He just...didn’t fit in with her carefully ordered world. He was her friend, but not.
Her eyes dropped to theA, and she sighed, swinging back and forth in her roller chair. She shouldn’t even be up right now. Replying wasn’t the smartest idea, not when sheknewAnton would write back, and she only had three hours before she needed to be up.
But ifshe did reply, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d lost sleep over chatting with Anton. Certainly wouldn’t be the last either. The pair had begun corresponding because of work and, at first, the emails had been three or four lines at most, counting a thank-youandgoodbye. But somewhere in those early emails on specifications for lens delivery and schematic requests, Grace and Anton had fallen into a friendly back-and-forth.
She didn’t know when it happened, but maybe it had been inevitable from the start. He was funny, there was no denying it, and he thought she was clever, which only stoked her excitement at seeing a new email appear fromA, as he signed them.
Anton Kovalev.
Grace didn’t even need to Google him to know who he was. His notoriety preceded him. From the beginning she had known who she was talking to, on account of the fact that he was famous. Like, the big-time kind of famous that demanded nondescript hoodies and dark baseball caps pulled down low over aviator sunglasses to keep people from recognizing him. It was what happened when you were born a billionaire and frittered away your youth as a hell-raising playboy. Not that any of that mattered in the grand scheme of things, or so Grace told herself.
There was no way the man she knew now was the same one who had once upon a time favored supermodels, benders that lasted weeks, or trashing sports cars.
Her Anton,the one she knew, was one of the leading lights of the science world. He didn’t even go home from the labs some nights, opting to sleep on the pull-out couch he kept for just that purpose.
She knew as much because of the phone calls.
She rubbed her neck, thinking back three weeks ago to that first 2am call that had woken her up like a jolt of lightning. He’d called four times in the days that followed it, and each time it made her nervous and giddy, because those damned sporadic phone calls did far more for her than any date with a man had in months—hell, maybe even years.
That couldn’t be normal.
She winced, recalling how good his voice sounded when roughened by sleepiness, how interested he was in her day and her thoughts, even as he chastised her that she should be sleeping.
