She needed him. And so he didn’t leave.
She has to do something right now to stop thinking about how she can’t have the one man who wants to do the opposite of taking something from her.
“The watch is fine,” she says. “Let’s go.”
She starts down the first row of lockers, chattering to fill the quiet. “My dad would go wild for this place. Some of these lockers probably haven’t been opened since the museum was built. I’d love to bring him here when—” Ripley catches herself. “Someday,” she finishes.
“Your father loves dinosaurs too?”
“He wanted to be a paleontologist. He had to drop out of college when I came along.”
James cocks his head. “You went into paleontology to please your father?”
“He never asked me to, but I spent my whole childhood doing it as a hobby. I mean, you probably grew up talking chemistry at the dinner table.”
“Something like that.” James’s eyes dart ahead, looking for the first locker number on their list. “J.D. was very happy to see you today. You two were…close?”
“Very,” she says. “Ha! Found it.” She bends down to a locker at ground level.
James makes a choking sound. Ripley straightens with an undignified hop, grabbing at her miniskirt like something bit her in the ass.
James’s face is beet red. He’s pretending to be absorbed in the prep table at the end of the aisle, which features a stack of plywood, a yogurt container crammed with six bottles of glue, and no bones.
This is why she wears pants. “Why don’tyouopen it,” she says testily.
The locker greets them with a breath of eternity-scented air. Inside, gray metal drawers hold boxes of bones, each piece nestled in custom-cut foam.
Ripley pulls out a drawer of neatly bottled teeth in every size from velociraptor to Bambiraptor.
“What are we looking for?” James asks.
“Anything that looks wrong or misplaced. Or missing.”
James runs his hand over the jumble of bottles. “How am I supposed to tell if something’s missing?”
“Exactly. You wouldn’t think it’s easy to steal a fossil, but in a collection this big, it’s easy to lose track of small things. People grab a specimen and forget to check it out. Someone reorganizes, then leaves, and no one knows what got moved.
“Also, if I were Will, I’d have asked to see a lot of drawers I didn’t care about to throw people off my trail.” She closes the locker. “Hopefully something will jump out at us. Here, you take the next locker,” she says, handing him the sheet of paper detailing the fossil Will was supposed to have examined. “I’ll take the one after that.”
Ripley falls into a semi-mindless routine: check a locker, close it up, pull the cart to the next location. The data sheets start to blur in her mind. Sometimes, she watches James peer in a drawer, frowning over the contents. Once, she catches him with his eyes closed, face tipped toward the soaring warehouse ceiling, rolling his shoulders. The front of his neck arches so tenderly, she can’t breathe for a second.
In the windowless space, time passes slowly, but they still don’t have long enough. She closes another drawer of fangs, muttering, “How many teeth does one museum really need?”
James’s voice floats over the bank of lockers in front of her. “From what I’ve seen tonight, all of them.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, smart-ass.”
“When talking to oneself, one must includeAdamsat the end of the sentence. It gets quite confusing for others if this step is omitted.”
“Ha-ha.”
James comes around the corner to pick up another page. “Will you and J.D. keep in touch now that you’ve found each other again?”
“I hope so. I love J.D. I mean, everyone loves him. He broke upa lot of fights by walking into the middle of an argument like”—Ripley mimes being huge and deliberately clueless—“Hey, guys, what’s happening?He really knows his way around a backhoe too.”
James coughs. “Abackhoe?”
“Yeah. To get the big specimens out of the ground,” she says distractedly, looking over a box of tiny fragments. “For the really big ones, likeT. rex,we sometimes had to bring in a helicopter.”
