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she didn’t want to refuse. But he could see she was a little apprehensive. “My name is Dr. Bhakti Singh.” That meant nothing to her. He held out a photo of a young lady, smiling with daddy at a birthday party table. Daddy was wearing a silver cone hat. The girl was kissing him on the cheek, like she’d just got her first pony. Sweet Jane. Sweet Jane alive, before she became an armless Jane Doe torso in the back of a Chevy.
    â€œJanet was my daughter.”
    â€œOh my God, come in.”
    They sat at the long glass table; Rachel had magically pulled herself together, tequila bottle back on the shelf, water for green tea on the bright red Viking range. Boy, was she good. But this sudden appearance of Sweet Jane’s father stopped Cheryl. How the hell had he found his way to her door? Maybe he read Officer Gibson’s name in the papers. But that didn’t come close to explaining how he made the leap between Sweet Jane and his Janet.
    The man, apologetic, said, “I’m sorry for disturbing you. I can see you’re busy. And I won’t take much of your time. The coroner’s office gave me your name, after…” He paused to breathe; then with some effort, “… after I identified Janet’s body. I hope that was all right?”
    â€œNo, please—it’s all right.” Still, Cheryl remained confused. “Did you register Janet a missing person? We never got a CODIS hit, nothing. How did you know to come here?”
    â€œJust lucky, I guess.” He looked down at his large hands; they left faint sweat outlines on the safety glass table. “I’m from Texas,” he said with the exhausted look of a man who’d just driven from Texas. “Three weeks ago, my Janet went down to a little border town on the Rio Grande with a friend for a local music festival. And neither of the girls ever came back. I’ve been looking for her since.”
    The green tea arrived; kind of pointless now. Bhakti stared at the steaming cup and nodded at it, as if finally recognizing the stuff. “I don’t think Janet’s DNA was properly entered into the system—so that’s why there was no CODIS recognition. I just—” His eyes clouded over. “Some people have asked me, how it was possible for such a homely man like me to make such a beautiful daughter.” He reached into his breast pocket for a handkerchief. His swarthy face pale and dry but he patted it anyway. “I just came by to say, I know it doesn’t make any difference now—” He choked a moment, then regained his voice. “I just came by to say thank you.”

 
    4
    The Sikh’s Wife
    That Felix face reached into peoples’ lives in the most peculiar ways.
    Hours after his daughter had failed to return from the Rio Grande border town music festival, Professor Bhakti Singh lost his only child, his wife, and a chunk of his mind all in the same day. Actually it took nearly two days, the longest of his life. Or maybe it was just Eleanor his wife who lost her mind—when they lost Janet. Or couldn’t get her back or—it hurt just to think about it.
    Amazing how quickly things could crumble, all in a few hours, making him wonder at everything he’d ever built, through years of struggle—gone in a matter of hours. His CV read like alphabet soup: MA in Applied Physics from the Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, a PhD from the California Institute of Technology, another from MIT in Materials Research.
    Then onto real life.
    Meeting Eleanor at NASA where he steadily rose with her help to head their radiation materials research team. The idea was to create a woven polyethylene fabric that could be molded around a spacecraft with two goals in mind: preventing punctures from micrometeoroids or space bullets, and attempting to solve the allied problem of solar radiation, capable of frying things flying beyond the Earth’s safe