by Dete Meserve
Elizabeth has a theory of her own: perhaps it was Shane who had called the FBI to report seeing the Stanton murder weapon in our backyard. The man provided enough detailed information about the gun that the FBI was able to get a search warrant because his description matched what the FBI already knew about the murder weapon.
He claimed to be our gardener, but the FBI was unable to track him down from the information he provided.
“We can see why Shane would think he needed to frame you for Rebecca’s murder,” Samuel says. “Because you were the only person who knew he’d been in her apartment that night.”
“And once he failed to get rid of you,” Elizabeth continues, “he knew the only way to save himself was to make it look like you did it.”
They have a lot of questions after that. How did Shane get into our house? How did the DVR get erased? How had I recovered the clips?
We take turns answering each of them, and as Ben tells how Shane has known the Stanton family since childhood, my eyes briefly catch his across the room. Even under the intense and unrelenting scrutiny of the FBI’s questions, I feel a jolt of electricity every time I look at him.
“I wouldn’t be here talking to either of you today if it weren’t for Sarah,” Ben tells the agents. “I owe it all to her.”
My eyes meet his and a soft smile sweeps across his face. I look into his eyes, always my favorite part of him, and all the things we’ve experienced together, created together, rush over me.
As unscientific as it sounds, something shifts in the atmosphere—a spark of some kind—and suddenly I am changed, it seems. Exhilarated.
That’s when I realize I’m no longer the Trojan asteroid—orbiting around him yet unseen. I’m no longer invisible.
He’s spotted me with his telescope. And he’s chosen me.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It’s Christmas morning and I’ve hidden the Wedding Santa in a place so difficult I’m sure Ben will never find it. It’s deep in the tree, accessible only if he moves aside a bulky wooden Planet Earth and a goofy ornament of a Christmas Elf in a rowboat fishing with a candy cane. And for the first time, I’ve slung a silky bag over Santa’s shoulder, filled with a surprise for Ben.
But he has no trouble finding the Wedding Santa, extracting it from the tree in under two minutes. “Found it!” He holds it up in triumph.
He digs into Santa’s bag and pulls out seven vintage DVDs. With an expression of complete confusion, he flips through them. “Seven sci-fi movies,” he says slowly. “Really bad, bordering on terrible . . . maybe worst-ever-made sci-fi movies.”
He looks at me, hoping for an explanation, but all I do is nod at him, as if to say, “Figure it out.”
He scans through the stack again, then notices that I’ve highlighted, in neon yellow, the first letter of each title. “Invasion of the Saucer Men, Mars Invaders, Space Master B-7 . . .”
He speeds through the stack, skimming the titles. “Outer Space Strangers . . . Red Planet Mars . . . Riders to Neptune . . . Year of the Space Creatures.”
His eyes light up as he realizes what they spell out.
Our gazes lock. “I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I was wrong about us. We are not broken. Let’s begin again.”
He leans in for a kiss, smelling of Old Spice. I feel a rush as his hands move up my body to cup my face.
My cell phone dings, alerting me to a text. I ignore it, losing myself in his kiss, which has grown from gentle to hot in 3.14 seconds.
When my phone dings again, I reluctantly break off the kiss and glance at the screen.
“It’s Detective Dawson,” I say. “He’s out front.”
Ben heads to the door and even though he only opens it briefly to let in the detective, flashes go off and there’s an immediate hubbub of reporters shouting questions from the street. He closes the door swiftly and locks it, hushing the sounds.
“Ben Mayfield,” he says, extending his hand.
Detective Dawson stares at him. No doubt he already knew that Ben was alive, but that doesn’t seem to make it any less shocking to come face-to-face with him.
“Detective James . . . Dawson, LAPD,” he says, stumbling through his introduction. “A lot of reporters out there,” he says, making small talk, but it’s obvious that he’s flustered, probably still absorbing the reality that Ben is standing in front of him. “You’d think this would’ve died down already.”
After her help in the Anza-Borrego, we’d given the first interview to Kate Bradley, but now that Ben was no longer a suspect in Rebecca Stanton’s murder, a new wave of reporters, vans, TV cameras, and people holding microphones camped out on our street, hoping to catch a glimpse—or a sound bite—from Ben. It only got worse when word leaked out that Ben and his Aurora partners had settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum. That sent another rush of reporters to our already choked street.
To the delight of my CIT bosses, some of the reporters—and not just the science journals—wrote about the Trojan asteroid discovery. And the ones who really did their research reported on the proposal for the new space telescope that CIT had just submitted with my name attached as principal investigator.
Detective Dawson turns to face Ben. “We’ve found the man who shot at you two in the Anza-Borrego. He tried to flee the scene, but the police officers responding to your 911 call were able to apprehend him.”
“Who is he?”
He looks at his notepad. “His name is Kevin Gates. He’s been part of the Stanton family operation for years, but that’s not who he was working for. He was hired by Shane Russo. He also confessed to shooting you and Antonio Spear.”
Although it’s not a surprise, my skin still pricks with goosebumps hearing the proof that Shane had hired someone to kill Ben.
“Where is Shane?” Ben asks. “Have you found him?”
“He’s not living in Brentwood, as he said he did. We found his apartment in Highland Park—that’s where his car was registered, too. But he took off. And left his wife behind.”
“Diane?”
“Yeah,” he says. “She’s pretty shaken up. Said Shane just left in the middle of the night and hasn’t come back. Claims she didn’t know anything about Rebecca Stanton, except that she was a childhood friend of Shane’s.”
The detective draws a deep breath. “The FBI has a whole team looking for him. And we’ll keep looking until we find him.”
“What about us? Are we still in danger?” I ask.
“Can’t say for sure, but now that it’s all over the news that Shane’s the prime suspect in Rebecca’s murder, he’s got no real motivation to keep you quiet anymore.”
True to form, the detective steps over to the Christmas tree and twists a Diamond Icicle between his fingers. “You know, it always struck me as kind of remarkable that with all the things happening to you, you still found time to decorate the tree like this.” He lifts a cardboard snowman ornament Zack made in second grade. “Not just a few ornaments here and there . . . your family’s story is up on this tree.” He glances at Ben. “What made you do this in the middle of . . . everything?”
“The tree helped remind me what was important,” Ben says, his eyes meeting mine across the room. “And I hoped it would help me win back something I’d lost.”
The laws of physics work across our solar system, our galaxy, perhaps across the universe and time itself. We see Newton’s law of gravity at work when we track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets. Light in our solar system shows the same chemical signature that we find in the most distant objects in the universe.
The fact that we see these physical laws in play throughout the cosmos makes the universe a simple, understandable place.
The human heart is not so easily understood. Sometimes what we’re seeking is right in front of us, even if we can’t see it. Sometimes we have to look beyond what’s concrete and measurable and trust in what’s unknowable.
Tonight the heavens are putting on a dazzling light show as Ben an
d I stand beneath a starry, glittery sky in the Anza-Borrego. It’s a new moon, ushering in new beginnings, so the moon is invisible tonight. After shining brightly for two weeks, it seems to have vanished. But although we cannot see it, we know it’s there, orbiting around as it has for millions of years.
Across the sky, I point my finger from the ladle of the Big Dipper to the North Star. It’s an ordinary star, one we’ve both seen a thousand times, but tonight it seems to burn brighter in the inky-black sky.
“The light from the North Star began its voyage 680 years ago,” I say. “Can you imagine that? The light we’re seeing began its journey centuries before Galileo. Before Newton. Before even Star Trek.”
Ben doesn’t answer. Or laugh. Then I notice that he’s not looking at the sky at all. He seems lost in thought, his eyes scanning the desert horizon.
“What’s wrong? Do you see something?”
He shakes his head. I search his eyes, looking for a clue to what’s on his mind.
“I was thinking about the time we came here. I proposed and gave you the infinity ring. Then we lost it.”
I nod, not sure what he’s getting at.
“Remember how we looked everywhere around here?” He sweeps his hand across the desert landscape. “And we ended up in that field of hedgehog cactus over there for what seemed like hours.”
I laugh. “Only it was the wrong field of cactus, remember? And we both ended up covered in cactus barbs.”
“All down our backs, too. Remember what happened after that?”
“No. Not really.”
“We were so set on finding that infinity ring that we split up, figuring we could cover more ground that way.”
“Only both of us got seriously lost,” I say, remembering. “And it took us forever to find our way back.”
There’s a lightness in his eyes when he looks at me. “Proof that we’re better together.” He brings out a black velvet ring box from his pocket, and even though I already know what’s inside, I feel a jolt of anticipation. As if it were only yesterday, I remember the gentle look in his eyes as he placed that ring on my finger and we both dreamed of the life we’d make together. We could not have envisioned the challenges of the next fifteen years, but neither could we imagine how our love would burn brighter.
He flips open the box and lifts out the infinity ring, its zoisite gemstones radiating a bright blue in the starlight.
“Come back to me, Sarah,” he whispers. “We’re better together.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is magic in the night sky. When I was ten, my parents took us camping in Southern Illinois, and I remember stepping out of my tent in the middle of the night and seeing the stars blazing high above me against an inky-blue sky. The longer I stared at the sparkling white dots rising above the towering oak trees, the more I noticed thousands and thousands of stars that had been invisible to me at home. As the Milky Way arched above me, I remember feeling a deep wonder and awe—a sense that I was connected to a world far more grand and mysterious than I had ever imagined.
My love for the stars has followed me into my adult life, where I’ve been an executive producer of an astronomy series for kids, Ready Jet Go!. While working on the series, I began to see that there is a profound connection between all we are discovering in the realm of the stars, and the universe of emotions within ourselves.
To me, the stars offer an ideal backdrop for a story about rediscovering a love that’s been right in front of us all along. In the universe, as in love, so many of our most important discoveries are made when we look past what seems to be true, when we find ways around our blind spots, and when we discover new ways to see through the darkness into the light.
This novel would not have been possible without the patience and love from the stars in my life: my husband, Paul, and our children Ben, Jake, and Lauren. I’m also forever thankful to friends who provided creative havens beneath the stars while I wrote this novel: Steve Monas and Maggie Megaw in beautiful Cape Cod and author Kes Trester at the glorious beach. And to Lake Union Publishing editor Christopher Werner, Krista Stroever, Laura Whittemore, and the entire editorial team—thank you for bringing out the best in this story and making it shine.
A special thank you to friend and astronomer Amy Mainzer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose insights about our planet and the universe always fascinate me, and who showed me that art and science are truly complementary—both are seeking to observe and understand the world around us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dete Meserve is the award-winning, bestselling author of Good Sam and Perfectly Good Crime. When she’s not writing, she is a film and television producer in Los Angeles and a partner and CEO of Wind Dancer Films. One of the series she’s producing is Ready Jet Go!, an award-winning astronomy and earth science series watched by millions of kids and families on PBS and around the globe. Her grandmother worked at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. Meserve lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children—and a very good cat that rules them all.