“Has anyone else come to visit Ethan lately?” he asked Sally, who was monitoring the sign-in process. He knew all the staff here, and had a great relationship with most of them.
“Sure, he gets plenty of visitors. Popular guy.”
“Anyone unexpected or unfamiliar?”
“Other than Taylor Swift? Nah.” She sighed as she handed him the sign-in sheet. “Sorry, that was my wishful thinking talking. Just the usual, your family, a friend from the neighborhood, no one sketchy.”
That was a relief. His biggest fear was that someone would track down Ethan to get to him. Honestly, he needed to cool it with the paranoia.
He found Ethan in the midst of building a Lincoln log house, which gave him a private little laugh. If only Mathilda was here to share it with him. He loved those little moments of mutual appreciation of absurdity. He missed them, and he missed her. Before Mathilda, he hadn’t realized how essentially alone he was. Sure, he had plenty of people in his life, but no one else with that perfect kind of wavelength connection.
Ethan tore himself away from the project to give Rory a long, affectionate hug.
“Where were you?” he demanded. With his already thinning sandy hair and freckled nose, he resembled their father, whereas Rory had more of their mother’s Japanese looks.
“I’ve been in Hawaii. Want to see some pictures?”
“Yes!”
Luckily, he’d been able to download a backup of his phone from the cloud. Even luckier still, apparently at some point he’d had enough of a cell connection that his phone had automatically uploaded. He had no idea where his phone was now, but at least he had access to the photos he’d taken in the jungle.
He flipped through them with Ethan. As he showed his brother photos of the brilliant bird of paradise anthuriums, the enormous racks of green bananas dangling from between fringed leaves, the curled tail of a boar running away into the jungle, he braced himself for the one photo that showed Mathilda.
He’d pored over it too many times to count. He loved that photo. She’d been deep in conversation with Robert, and when she’d spotted Rory with his phone, she’d met his gaze and crossed her eyes and made a goofy expression. Adorably, of course, like everything she did.
As soon as Ethan saw the photo he burst out laughing. He rocked forward and back, slapping his knee with his hand, like an old man on a park bench laughing at a joke from the old days. “She’s so funny!”
“Yeah, she’s pretty funny.” He tried to flip to a photo of a gecko, but Ethan refused to let him.
“Is she your friend?” he asked.
“Sure. Yes, you could call her a friend. She rescued me. But then I saved her from…well, I rescued her too. It went back and forth like that for a while.”
“What’s her name?” Ethan kept staring at Mathilda’s goofy face.
“Mathilda.”
“Can she come visit me?”
“Oh…well, no, she lives in Hawaii. Or possibly England.” He’d scoured every British newspaper he could find for mention of a big society wedding in the Aberdeen family, but hadn’t seen a mention.
“She should visit,” he declared. Geography meant nothing to Ethan. “She’s nice. I’m going to make her a present.” With that, he abandoned the Hawaii slide show, shoved his Lincoln Log house to the side, and pulled out a sheet of drawing paper.
“Ethan, I…I don’t think she can visit. I don’t know where she is or how to reach her.”
Already busy with his favorite colored pencils, Ethan barely glanced at him. “But you can do anything.”
“Well…” Rory didn’t want to break his brother’s heart by saying that was ridiculous. Of course he couldn’t do anything. On the other hand, he could still hear Lincoln’s words of praise about his resourcefulness.
You can do better.
That thought struck him as he watched his brother draw his favorite subject, an airplane. It wasn’t enough to know there was a transformative piece of energy technology out there. He had to spread the word. But how could he do that with no physical evidence, and without breaking his NDA?
Be resourceful. Get creative.
He slid to the next photo on his phone. There it was, in his palm, the crystal glowing in the dimness of the tent at the Nahele Research Camp. There was something so compelling about it even in a photograph.
And then it hit him.
