“We don’t have your National Health Service, James. He has medical debt. And I’d like to give him a better life.”
“Yes. I imagine you would.”
More silence. It feels impossible to be near him, but not in the way she meant when she made her rule about staying far away from paleontologists. It’s impossible to be near him and not have him. Impossible to consider that in a little under two months, he’ll be gone.
She’s relieved when they get to the museum. She grabs her oversize purse and bolts out of the car, pretending she wants to smooth the short denim skirt and fluttery green blouse she wore to try to impress Charlie. James watches a procession of tourists debarking from a tall bus and brushes imaginary dust from his trousers.
It’s eighty-five degrees, and still with the trousers. When her dad admired the outfit earlier, James delightedly launched a mini-monologue about the subtleties of Prince of Wales check. To Ripley the suit looks like textured gray-brown wool paired with one of those Belgian linen shirts and a quietly expensive watch, but what does she know?
The Royal Tyrrell is what you’d expect from a world-class museum built by Canadians: modest and unassuming, most of thelong rectangular building hidden by white pines. There are a number of cute dinosaur statues perfectly sized for kids to ride, all accompanied by cheerfulPlease Do Not Climb the Dinosaurs!signs. Not a single child is riding the dinosaurs, because Canada.
Ripley hasn’t darkened the doors of a paleontology museum since she left academia. She used to love them, obviously. She used to love everything about paleontology. Before.
Maybe today is the day she can love museums again.
“Would you like me to do the talking?” James says, taking in the velociraptor statue that appears to be leaping from the foliage at the front entrance.
“Why?” Because James is a man? Because he’s dressed like he’s at his country house in Whateveringhamshire? Because he’s James fricking Smithson, and she’s nobody? All of the above?
“Because sometimes you reveal more than you want to, and I don’t know how much you trust Charlie.”
“Rude,” Ripley says, offended. “I can keep plenty of secrets.”
James raises an eyebrow. “When you talk to yourself, which is semi-constantly, you call yourself Adams. Your shoulders hurt when your work is going badly—”
“What?”
“Because you dothis.” He hunches crossly. “You almost never wear your hair loose even though you secretly think it’s extraordinary. About which you are correct.” He inhales as if he’s surprised himself, then quickly adds, “And you still have nightmares about college examinations.”
She puts a hand to the low, thick, knotted bun that took her half an hour and three YouTube tutorials to make and stares at him in slightly bewildered, half-turned-on fascination. “How did you know about the exams?”
James looks studiously in the direction of the interpretive trail. “You talk in your sleep.”
“Well, I’m awake now. And you were supposed to besedated.”
“Sometimes I wake up at night if I take my medication during the day.” After a short silence, he adds, “Also, you’re not exactly quiet. As it were.”
“Oh myGod,James.”
At this, his barely there blush lights up like a sunrise. Ripley has the horrible suspicion she might have said that phrase in her sleep too.
“Fine,” she says. “I’ll do the introductions; you do the talking. Charlie will love you, anyway.” James’s reputation will be helpful, especially because Charlie hates talking about frauds. It’s been that way ever since he got fooled by Archaeoraptor. Surprising him with their suspicions about Will is a risk, but he would never have agreed to meet them if he’d known in advance.
“Superb.” James opens the door and holds it for Ripley.
She grits her teeth and walks into the belly of the beast.
Half an hour later, Ripley and James are perched on a maroon pleather bench in front of the gift shop, cooling their heels on the speckled granite floors of the small lobby, a soundtrack of twitters and roars emanating from the trees in the spookily lit Cretaceous diorama. Ripley can tell James wants to look at his fancy watch again by the way his long fingers drum against his trousers. “Stop twitching. You’re scaring the children.”
James’s eyebrows draw down. “Is Charlie always this late?”
“Let me guess,” Ripley says. “You’re apunctual-to-the-millisecond type. Always a Queen Elizabeth, never a Harry Styles.”
“There are more than two types of British people,” he says.
“Probably, but those are the only ones we’ve found in the fossil record. Besides, you should feel good about the amount of diversity in your country. There’s just one kind of Canadian. The nice ki—”
A deafening half-trumpet, half-fart sound obliterates Ripley’s impromptu taxonomy. She screams a little, as do about fifty museumgoers. James scrambles to his feet, looking around wildly.
