“Lila?” He’d blinked in confusion, then realized she’d been sitting next to someone—his father, Eric, who stood now, clasping Lila lightly by the hand.
“It’s good to see you again,” Lila had said.
“We’re so glad you came,” Eric agreed.
And Andrew had understood.
I’ve found someone else, someone I want to spend the rest of my life with.
“It’s not what you think,” Eric had said, recognizing that the confusion in his son’s face had yielded to anger and pain. “Lila and I ran into each other at our lawyer’s office right after Beth died.”
“I left Gordon,” Lila had said with a smile, as if this should be something Andrew applauded, for which he’d be proud of her.
“And I was there taking care of some paperwork about Beth,” Eric had said, as if Beth had been nothing more than an incident, something secondary and insignificant, a matter he’d dealt with in between golf outings or commuter flights. “We recognized each other from that time you brought her out for dinner.”
“It took us both a moment to figure out where we’d seen each other before,” Lila had cut in, her voice overlapping, the two of them looking at each other and laughing like it was all some big joke.
“Then we got to talking and went out for drinks, talked some more,” Eric said. “One thing led to another after that.”
“And here we are,” Lila finished with a giddy laugh, draping her hand on Eric’s chest—just like she’d once touched Andrew.
“We’d both been unhappy for a long, long time,” Eric had said. “We didn’t mean for it to be more than friendship, but it grew from there.” Smiling at Lila, he’d drawn her hand to his lips, kissed her knuckles. “We’re getting married next week in Anchorage.”
Something in Andrew had snapped and at this, he’d balled his hand into a fist and punched Eric in the face, knocking him flat on his ass.
“Eric!” Lila had cried, falling to her knees, clutching at him.
“You son of a bitch,” Andrew had told him as Eric had looked up, wide-eyed with shock, a thin, crooked line of blood trickling down from his left nostril.
Careful to preserve the existing creases, Andrew folded the letter into quarters again. He’d gone to his mother’s house upon leaving the restaurant that fateful day, and had sat at the kitchen table while she’d placed a bag of frozen peas on his swollen, aching knuckles. She hadn’t asked what had happened and he hadn’t volunteered to tell. Instead, she’d pulled out a Scrabble game and they’d played together until long into the night, the way they always had when he’d been a kid, when Beth had still been alive and had joined him.
Beth was always the ace of Q words, he remembered, smiling now at the thought. They’d always kept a dictionary at the table when they’d play, because invariably Beth had come up with new Q-but-no-U words that neither he nor his mother had ever heard of. He’d pulled one that night with his mom: qadi, a type of judge in Islam. It had seemed rather fitting at the time.
Stretching out on his bed with his head and shoulders propped up on pillows, he balanced the scrapbook against his lap and thumbed through the pages, reading through the articles again. His gaze lingered on a full-color shot, the cover of an issue of Discover magazine that showed Moore standing in among a trio of men, all dressed in white lab coats looking somberly at the camera. Playing God, the tagline read. The world’s leading geneticists race solve the mystery of life.
He had told Dani about what had happened the night before after she’d returned to the barracks, how he’d noticed Alice outside and had followed her to the lab building.
“You mean, you went inside the house of pain?” Dani had asked, wide-eyed. “What’s it like? What did you see?”
“Not much. Just a lot of signs warning about biohazards.” He’d told her about Lucy the Siamang and the curious little playroom where Alice had brought her to play Candyland. He had also mentioned the scrapbook.
“Dr. Moore won a Nobel Prize?” She’d gawked at him. “You’re kidding! What’s he doing here, working for the Army?”
Andrew had been admittedly curious about that himself.
Because he’d been able to tell from Dani’s face, the way her brows had lifted in tandem, that her curiosity had been piqued, he’d said, “The book’s still up in my room, if you want to look at it.”
That was when she’d talked him into helping her squad fix dinner. “You can show it to me after that, what do you say?” she’d suggested.
Someone knocked at his door, and Andrew jerked in guilty surprise, slapping the scrapbook closed and shoving it off his lap. “Who is it?” he called, flipping the corner of the bedspread over to cover the book, then rearranging a pillow over top to further camouflage.
“Corporal O’Malley,” came the reply.
“Hey,” Andrew said, puzzled as he opened the door.
“Hey.” O’Malley gave him a friendly nod, then held something out—the shirt he’d given to Alice earlier. “Dr. Montgomery asked me to bring this to you. Said it’d probably be best if Dr. Moore didn’t find it in the apartment.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Andrew took the shirt from the corporal, then carried back to the bed, using the opportunity to drop it on top of the pillow covering the stolen scrapbook.
“I hear you won last night,” O’Malley said. “The pool tournament. Good job.”
“Thanks. But I have a feeling Dani could’ve handled those guys just fine on her own.”
O’Malley leaned against the doorframe, a comfortable posture, folding his arms across his chest. “The way I hear tell of it, you pretty much ran the table.”
Andrew shrugged. “I got off a couple of lucky shots, that’s all.”
Even though O’Malley smiled as he spoke and his words were affable enough, something in his demeanor was cool, the same sort of tension palpable as it had been when he’d asked Andrew if he’d found something funny about serving his country. Then, as now, his eyes fixed on Andrew and stayed there, pinning him. “The way I hear tell of it, sounds like you and Dani hit it off pretty good last night.”
Andrew fumbled for a moment, then said, “She’s, uh, a good player.”
“I meant after the game,” O’Malley said mildly. “Today, too, out in the garage.”
He’s been trying to get in her pants since the day he got here, Matt LaFollette had said about O’Malley. Langley said he was the only guy he’d ever seen who was pussy-whipped without getting any pussy.
“She’s a nice girl,” Andrew said.
“Yeah, she is.” Unfolding his arms, O’Malley stepped away from the door, walking slowly, idly toward Andrew. “The thing is, Santoro’s a really nice girl. She’s the only girl here besides Dr. Montgomery. I try to look out for her around here on account of that. You know, like she’s my sister.”
“Sister.” Andrew nodded once. “Right.”
O’Malley smiled, patently condescending. “You seem like a smart enough guy, Just-Andrew. You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?”
Andrew met O’Malley’s gaze evenly. “I think so.”
“Good.” O’Malley nodded once. “I wanted to make sure we’re on the same page, you and me, so we don’t have to have this conversation again. I don’t like to repeat myself. And you got a nice face.” He chuckled, patting Andrew’s cheek. “I’d sure hate to mess it up.”
With a frown, Andrew knocked his hand away. “Fuck you, O’Malley.”