Ethan
Sorry for the keysmash. My dog knocked over my phone when I started laughing.
Forster
No worries. (Honestly, the joke wasn’t THAT good.) But—more importantly: you have a dog? What breed?
“Smile,” he told the golden retriever, and snapped a picture.
Ethan
His name is Bunsen.
Forster
Look at that happy face! I’d also love to have a dog, but it’s not easy—despite my detergent, walker, and takeout app—to manage in most apartments along the San Francisco Peninsula. I just admire other people’s pets right now. So hi, Bunsen!
“Forster says hi.”
Bunsen whined.
“What? You’ve already had your egg and bacon, and—oh. It’s time for our noon walk, isn’t it? What the hell happened to the morning?”
It was a rhetorical question. He knew exactly how he’d spent his morning, and what he’d learned:
Forster lived in the Bay Area.
Her straw made a gurgly sucking sound against the bottom of her glass, drawing air instead of the Greek yogurt, chia seed, and frozen raspberry smoothie that she’d whizzed up after her run along the Stanford Dish trail. Erin released the tube to inspect its malfunction.
Huh.
The glass was empty, warm in her hand. She must’ve finished her breakfast a while ago but hadn’t noticed, too absorbed with her computer and her phone. With work, with Bannister—and with Bunsen.
She enlarged the picture on her screen. Bunsen was a handsome young dog, a coppery retriever with soulful eyes, a mischievous lopsided grin, a tongue a mile long, and egg in his whiskers. Cassie was forbidden from begging at the Monaghan table but, probably like Bunsen, she somehow always ended up sampling their meals… Smiling and shaking her head, she expanded the photo farther. Those columns of steel beside the retriever were the legs of either a table or an industrial-style desk, weren’t they? That was definitely a sock between Bunsen’s paws.
Cassie liked socks, too.
Dark blue socks with golden bears around the ankles never would’ve been allowed into the Grand Arbor house, however. Bunsen’s sock—Bannister’s sock—was printed in incriminating UC Berkeley colors, with an even more incriminating UC Berkeley logo.
Cal bear.
She switched from analyzing the sock to analyzing Bannister’s phone number: a 510 area code. 510 was local to the East Bay. To the Berkeley area.
Not that it matters, she told herself again.
But a search forBannister + UC Berkeleypopped up on her screen. She scrolled, clicked, and scrolled again. The results were inconclusive. Several Banisters currently were or had previously been affiliated with the university. There wasn’t a single Bannister.
She’d already considered the possibility that the artist used a pseudonym, hadn’t she?
She shrugged away from her phone and her computer after a few fruitless minutes. The loose wire in her bra prodded her ribs. She peeled up her shirt; a red pressure point had formed on her skin from her hunch over her desk. She’d spent almost the whole morning curved toward her screens, messaging with Bannister in between stints of preliminary data modeling on her latest LIGO exports, and she anticipated a favorable outcome from next week’s meeting with Nadine, in which she’d pitch her work on gravitational waves as an additional research area to showcase during the Secretary of Energy’s visit to SVLAC.
Ethan Meyer was probably refining a similar pitch on his quantum work to his own supervisor this weekend, calculating and then optimizing each sacrosanct data point in isolation for success.
Robot, she dismissed him, rubbing at her ribs. But even if he wasn’t a robot, he was likely still being more productive than she was. Because honestly: what portion of her morning had she spent with her data, and what part had she spent distracted by Bannister? Yet again:Not that it matters. She’d best her rival anyhow, despite her preoccupation with the artist. And his dog.
Bannister had that gorgeous retriever, while she—
Damn.
