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populated part, where cowboys and oil wells dotted the lone prairie.
    City names swirled through my mind, potential backdrops for my potential new life. Dallas, Houston, Austin . . . uhhhh . . . San . . . something . . . San Antonio. Abilene, like in the old song about cattle drives. Or was that in Kansas? Abilene, Kansas, or Texas?
    â€œMoses Lake.” Daniel’s answer broke through the clatter in my mind, silencing it momentarily.
    Moses Lake. Never heard of that one. The word Lake implied something pleasant—water, sun, surf. Texas did have coastal areas and large inland bodies of water. The Clean Energy Bill’s Texas cosponsor had tucked something in there to provide financial incentives for hydroelectric power generation on Texas rivers.
    Moses Lake could be good.
    Keeping an open mind here.
    â€œWhere is that?” I inched into new territory, since I had no idea what Daniel was thinking and how this job offer might affect the two of us.
    A baffled headshake answered my question. “I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere in the middle. There’s an island involved. Firefly Island.”
    â€œBut what’s it near?” Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio. Give me a reference point. Someplace to anchor my fantasy future.
    Daniel shook his head again, his gaze analyzing the room, as if he were already considering the size and number of moving boxes needed. “Don’t know. I didn’t want to look like an idiot, asking the man a million questions. He was in a limo on his way from the airport, so he didn’t tell me a lot, except that he maintains research crop plots there, as well as a state-of-the-art lab, and then he mentioned something about Firefly Island. I’m sure, being Jack West, he just assumes that people know all about him. He wants me there in a month.”
    Jack West . . . Why was that name familiar?
    Nick tapped my hand with a cracker package, and I opened it without thinking, then handed it back to him. “There you go, peapod.” Over the past couple days, I’d adopted my mother’s usual endearment for anyone under the age of twenty-five, peapod.
    â€œI need a map,” Daniel muttered and headed for the door. “A real paper map I can look at all at once.” He didn’t evenask if I would stay and watch Nick. He just left. Somehow, I liked that. It implied that I belonged here.
    By the time Daniel came back, he’d already looked at the map and folded it to two panels surrounding the mystery job location. Moses Lake was a tiny dot in a crease, the letters so small it practically blended into the background. Surrounding it, although not too closely, lay other little map-dot towns with names like Cleburne, Blum, Aquilla, and Walnut Springs. There was nothing of major metropolitan size nearby. Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and even smaller cities like Waco seemed disturbingly far away, reachable only via pencil-thin strips of highway printed in an unpromising light gray.
    I felt myself going queasy, my bound-for-Texas version of the future warping like an image in a funhouse mirror. Clearly, I wouldn’t be following Daniel and Nick to Texas, applying for jobs nearby, setting myself up in a little apartment around the corner until such time as we’d come far enough in the relationship to merge our lives, so to speak. This place in the fold, this Moses Lake, was a life without me in it.
    I could see in Daniel’s eyes that he was seriously considering the trade-offs. I could hear it in his voice as he talked about the offer from Jack West, the owner of tiny, but well-funded, West Research. Daniel was more excited than I’d ever seen him. He’d heard Jack West speak at the symposium. Apparently Mr. West had heard Daniel, as well, and he was impressed. He felt that Daniel’s work with genetically modified grains would fit nicely into West’s master plan to develop super