She never used to mind sharing her work. When Will’s research wasn’t going well, she gave him her papers to proofread so she could add his name to the list of authors. Same with sharing money; when his parents cut him off and he was strapped for cash, she paid their rent and he paid the much smaller utility bill.
She started minding when he needed teaching hours to keep his grant funding and asked her to split her summer teaching-assistant hours with him. Will had started every session late and skipped material so he could finish early. His “teaching” consisted of reading from her slides. Yet at the end of the course, his TA ratings were a full point higher than hers.
Rita Shankar—the only other female PhD candidate in paleontology—rolled her eyes when Ripley mentioned it. “He got marked higher because he’s a man. Haven’t you read the studies about gender bias in teaching evaluations? A word of advice: Don’t try to make the students love you, Ripley. Women are better off being respected.” Tossing her dark curls, Rita breezed off to download more citations.
Ripley made Smithson promise not to take credit for her work. But what if he only has to be physically present for everyone to assume he did the work and give him the accolades?
Beside her, the man in question surveys the narrow, twisty canyon carved into the farmland like a tooth mark in a bone. Compared to the large-scale operations in Hell Creek, Clever Girl is minuscule. Unimpressive. A little disorganized. Pathetically few tarps lie scattered across the canyon floor. Her ragtag crew crowds around him—all except Matteo, her embarrassing nepotism hire.
“Well?” she asks, a little too tightly.
“I’ve never dug anywhere like this.” His eyes glow. “I cannot wait to see what you’ve found.”
The crew rustles and murmurs with pleasure. Ripley glances suspiciously at him, but as far as she can tell, his excitement is genuine.
Against her will, a small flame leaps to life in her heart, the way it does when someone loves the thing you love.
“Let’s start at the north end,” she says. Jordin scrambles to the head of the pack, beaming and adjusting the bandanna she wears over her dark micro-locs. Within minutes, the thrill of Smithson’s curiosity and praise has her almost hyperventilating. Matteo jumps to help replace her tarp afterward, mysteriously useful now that she’s paying more attention to the new guy than to him.
Smithson’s every bit as gracious about Griff’s forelimb, the twins’ pedestal work, Cara’s multiple excavations, and even something Matteo is convinced is a coprolite—fossilized dung.
And then they’re at the south end of the canyon, and Ripley’s chest is tightening.
She crouches down and removes the rocks that secure her tarp. She wants both to please him and to tranquilize the part of herself that craves his praise.
A hush falls as she rolls back the fabric. Beauty’s not a secret, but the pace of private excavation doesn’t leave much time for teaching. Ripley showing her off—that’s new.
Smithson makes a hoarse, shocked sound. He doesn’t so much get down on his knees as fall on them, probably ruining the trousers he’s stubbornly still wearing.
“Professor?” Ripley asks uncertainly.
He reaches for Beauty. Then, as if remembering himself, he glances at Ripley. The look on his face when she nods reminds her of when, at sixteen, in the back of Tai Collins’s mom’s Hyundai, she told Tai he could take off her shirt. She thinks Tai’s handswere shaking more than Smithson’s are now, but it’s too close to call.
“Carpometacarpal,” he mutters, caressing the fused wrist and finger bones that look more like a bird’s wing than any hundred-million-year-old fossil has a right to. “Bloody hell.”
Pride and excitement swell hard in her throat. “I think digit one is partially fused, but digit two is free. We’ll find out for sure in the scanner.”
“Bloody hell,” he repeats, stroking up to the shoulder. “Ripley. The coracoid. You have the coracoid.”
“Yeah. I have it.” Ripley cried when she unearthed the supporting link between Beauty’s shoulder and her breastbone. She’s almost crying now, seeingtheJames Smithson touching a coracoid that’s not round and mobile like you’d find in a dinosaur that ran, but long and fixed like you’d see in a dinosaur that flapped.
Like a dinosaur that flew.
For one brilliant second, she pictures Beauty in one of Smithson’s taxonomies, wings spread in victory like a phoenix.
Abruptly, Smithson stands. He takes a few pacing steps, his hands interlaced behind his neck in a pose that’s almost agony. “Dear God, Ripley. You did thisalone?”
“I had Cara and the crew.”
“But no mentorship. Zero institutional backing or resources. Do you know what this find could mean?” He swoops back down, brushes a speck of earth from the coracoid.
Jordin kneels beside him. “What could it mean, James?”
Smithson’s busy fingers fit themselves into joints and grooves. “Well,” he murmurs softly, prompting Griff and the twins to crouch down too. “The critical differences between a theropod and a bird are in the shoulder girdle, wrist, and fingers.” Matteoand Cara lean in, completing a tight circle of khaki-clad butts and sealing Ripley out.
The warmth in her stomach turns to ice.
It was a mistake to bring him here. A mistake not to teach the crew about Beauty herself. Of course they were curious. They knew it was a big deal, and they wanted to be part of it.
