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He opened the box. Jenna blinked, taken aback. “Oh, my gosh. Is that real?”
“Teardrop sapphire with diamond baguettes. It belonged to my mother.”
Jenna’s eyes went wide and somber behind her glasses. “Um... Are you sure? I mean, since this isn’t a real thing, maybe we shouldn’t...”
“Malcolm, Hendrick and Bev will all recognize this ring,” he told her.
“Oh. Well. In that case, I suppose it makes sense.” There was a tiny frown line between her dark eyebrows as he took it out and slid it onto her ring finger.
It fit perfectly. Her cheeks flushed, and her gaze dropped. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured. “I’ll be careful. I know how precious it is.”
On impulse, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.
Jenna froze, the color in her cheeks deepening, and tugged her hand free. “Excuse me. Gotta, um, feed my cat. Before we, um, go.” She hurried into the kitchen.
Drew wandered around the open-plan apartment. A sliding picture window opened out onto the deck overlooking the backyard. City lights twinkled below it. The living room was separated by a bar from the kitchen, and a couch and a cushy armchair were angled around a TV. The rest of the room was dominated by a long worktable, lit up by industrial hanging lamps and piled with cables, electronic components and schematics. The walls were paneled with corkboard, and a mosaic of information was attached, as well as dozens of photographs. Jenna with various other people. One was a child with a gap-toothed grin, holding up two prosthetic arms triumphantly high in a double thumbs-up.
Jenna came back into the room buttoning up a long, nipped-in black wool coat.
“Is this where you do your research?” he asked her.
“Most of it I do at the Arm’s Reach lab. But I like having a workspace at home. When I get ideas, I like to have everything I need to pin them down fast.”
He strolled around, gazing at the schematics tacked to the wall. “Impressive.”
“So is the Triple Towers sustainable housing complex in Tokyo,” she said. “That’s some truly amazing, forward-thinking design. Congratulations for your prize, by the way.”
“You heard about that?”
“Read about it online. Time magazine, I think. Great profile they wrote about you, too. Fawning, even.”
“Was it? I didn’t notice.”
She smiled at him. There was a moment of odd silence, and Jenna gestured toward the door. “Smudge can let himself in the cat door whenever he’s ready for his dinner, so shall we go? I wouldn’t want to be late.”
“Right.”
Drew got her settled into his car before getting inside himself. As he turned the key in the ignition, the podcast he’d been listening to on the drive over blared out of the speakers, startlingly loud without the car noise to cover them.
“...with artificial sensory nerves, the issues are different,”recorded Jenna said to the podcaster. “We’ve brought together many different lines of research in the—”
He switched it off. Damn. That podcast was online, out in the public domain, and yet still he felt as if he’d been caught snooping in her phone.
“Holy cow,” Jenna said, startled. “Was that me? The Outside the Box podcast?”
“Yeah. Just, you know. Informing myself about who you are. What you do.”
“Oh, of course,” she said quickly. “That makes sense. I should have done the same. But I probably know more about your business just because Ava keeps me up to date on the big stuff. Prizes, and all that. She’s so proud of you. She boasts and gloats nonstop.”
They drove in silence for a while, and finally Drew found the nerve to say it. “I saw your Women in STEM talk, too. The TED talk. And your Wexler Prize presentation speech.”
She gave him a startled glance. “Good Lord. All that tonight?”
“You’re an excellent speaker,” he said. “I got sucked in. Didn’t want to stop.”
Her eyes slid away, but she looked pleased. “It was hard-won,” she admitted. “Public speaking terrified me for the longest time. But I just kept at it until I could power through. I can’t believe you watched all that stuff in one go.”
“It was fascinating,” he said. “Clear, convincing, well structured. Funny.”
