She so resembled Ethan’s late brother that it took his breath away to look at her. “You’re . . .”
“Delia. Nice to meet you, Uncle Ethan. Finally.”
A blade of rage sliced through him. But he could no longer indulge in fury, even when it was justified. Anger magnified what he lived with constantly and turned his pain into a branding iron. Ethan tilted slightly to his left and breathed in and out, waiting for the world to resume its rightful course.
Even so, the look he gave Sonya was enough to send her scurrying down the pier as she said, “Tell him to hurry.”
Ethan said to Delia, “I can’t believe I’m just meeting you.”
“It’s not what you think. Well, okay, maybe it is. At least partly.” Delia had her father’s hair, dark and long. She wore it woven into a rope as thick as her arm. And those eyes. Crystal grey and incredibly intense and constantly looking for a reason to smile. “See, a couple of weeks after I was born, Mom was taken to court by her Washington investors.”
“Thieves and brigands, the lot of them,” Sonya called back.
“Fighting them cost Mom everything,” Delia went on. “Her job, her research, her reputation, the works.”
Ethan allowed himself to be gently ushered back toward the shore. The pier was missing a number of planks, which meant he had to take his gaze off his niece.
His niece.
He said, “That was thirty-four years ago.”
“Right. Thirty-five next week. After that, life just kept getting harder. Her investors claimed the right to buy her company. Mom being Mom, when they pressured her, she somehow misplaced crucial elements of her research.”
“Correction. I destroyed anything they could possibly use and handed over a smoldering wreck.”
“See?” Delia smiled. “What could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?”
“They gave me no choice at all,” Sonya huffed from up ahead. “And if you insist on telling our entire past history to this man, you really should try to get it right.”
Sonya’s ire left her daughter untouched. “Okay, then the investors charged her with theft, larceny, breach of contract, the works. So Mom up and vanished and officially became a fugitive from justice.”
Sonya reached the end of the pier and stomped across the parking lot. “Give my work to those idiots? I’d rather die.”
Ethan asked, “Why didn’t you contact me?”
Delia gave him the sort of patented look that had been Adrian’s trademark in front of juries. A sideways glance that invited everyone to peer beneath the surface and see the truth. “Okay, point of order. You were nine thousand miles away at the time, am I right?”
“I came home. Occasionally.”
“So my mother, who did not consider you her closest pal, should have tried to track you down whenever your global surf trek brought you back to this part of the world? Please.”
“You sound so much like your father it hurts.” And it did. Terribly.
Delia reached out and took a companionable hold on his arm, like she had been doing it for years. “The short version of what happened next is, I changed my name. Legally became a Smith. Cut all ties to Mom’s past. It was the only way to keep working with her.” She flashed her father’s smile. “Plus, the way Mom described you, I had no reason to contact the ogre from the east.”
Sonya called back, “How long do we have?”
Delia checked the timer on her phone. “Fourteen and a half minutes.”
Sonya paused long enough to glare at Ethan. “Could you possibly walk any slower?”
When Sonya resumed stomping across the lot, Ethan asked softly, “Why did you bother staying with that woman? I mean, why not just cut and run?” He had to know.
Delia even had her father’s shrug. A good-natured lifting of chin and shoulders both, a smile that never went further than those incredible eyes. “Mom’s a genius. You need to accept that and move on. Because she’s right. We don’t have much time.”
Four trucks with empty trailers were parked alongside the boat ramp. The only other two vehicles were Ethan’s ride and a vintage refrigerated truck.
Ethan watched as Sonya headed for the truck and asked, “Time for what?”
“We’re here to offer you a chance to save my father’s life.”
CHAPTER
TWO
Delia’s casual comment stopped him entirely. “Is this a joke?”
“Does Mom look like somebody who has ever, in her entire life, told a joke?” Delia took a firmer grip on his arm and urged him forward. “We know the process works. At least, it does on mice, hamsters, an egret, and three young pigs. You’re our test goat. That’s what Mom calls you.”
Sonya’s hearing was as sharp as her mind. She yelled back, “You’re not helping!”
“Actually, I am.” To Ethan, “We know you’re dying. Mom’s been checking. You’ve got, what, three months?”
“Maybe more.”
“We understand your pain is getting worse. That much is true, yes?”
“By the hour.”
“We’re hoping you would be willing to try and do the impossible.” She offered the day’s best smile. “With a little help from your friends.”
Ethan only half pretended that his discomfort forced him to walk even slower. She certainly had a point. What was more, despite all the impossibilities he felt a faint spark of hope. It was ridiculous, of course. But there was something to these two women and their intelligence and urgency. Something that defied the fact that Ethan was just weeks from checking out.
How many nights had he awoken and lain there wishing for a chance to do that day over? Be there by his brother’s side? Save Adrian’s life, even if it meant giving up his own?
Ethan realized she was watching him. “Can I ask a question?”
“Manners. Nice. Go for it.”
“Did Adrian know? About you, I mean. Because he never mentioned that little tidbit to me. I would have remembered.”
“Mom didn’t know until a couple of weeks after Dad’s funeral.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Drinks all around, right?”
“Your father used to say that.”
“I know. I used to beg Mom for stories about Dad. I guess some of them just slipped into my psyche.”
Sonya reached the truck’s rear doors and paused long enough to glare at her daughter before wrenching open the long metal handles. The doors groaned loudly as they opened.
The truck had been crudely whitewashed. A faint impression of the grocery chain’s smiling-pig logo was still visible on the side. The paint was blistered by rust spots, but the engine rumbled smoothly, and the refrigeration unit hummed atop the rear hold.
Delia’s speech became crisp, tight, faster. “Back to the matter at hand. Basically, we’ve created a warp in the quantum time field. This requires a focus of vibrational energies with a laser’s pinpoint accuracy. The end result is, we can shoot your consciousness back to a specific point in time. You need to understand, time is not linear. Our physical perception of time is. At the quantum level, time is a map. We have calculated the map coordinates of you eighteen days before Dad’s death.”