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that her first answer was no.
    Maybe she had turned him down because of her career or the fact that she was only twenty-two and wasn’t ready to settle down. Or maybe her father loomed so large that anyone else seemed to fall short. He was a successful businessman, a rugged former boxer who dominated any room. Samantha idolized him, and she knew that his traits were what she was looking for in a husband, whether consciously or not. So far, in the halls of medical school and laboratories, she hadn’t found them.
    A man sat one stool away from her and ordered a beer. He turned to her and smiled . “Hi, I’m Brad.”
    “Sam. Nice to meet you.”
    “You, too. Haven’t seen you here before.”
    “I’m not really a drinker.”
    “Who you texting?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “I saw you texting. Just wondering who.”
    “No offense, but I kind of came here to be alone.”
    “You picked a helluva place to be by yourself,” he said.
    He was right. Why would she come to a bar , of all places, to be alone? She finished her soda, then brushed past him on her way outside. A hiking trail wasn’t far from here, and reaching the summit of a hill overlooking the city took only about fifteen minutes. After driving there, she was pleased to see there were no other people around.
    The dirt on the path was smooth, and her hike was quick. She took out her mace and held it in her hand until she reached the summit, where she placed it in her pocket and sat down.
    The lights of Atlanta twinkled, and a plane flying by overhead blinked rapidly from the cadre of illuminations along its body. Streetlamps looked like glimmering buttons in the dark, and farther up, past the mountains of steel and glass, were flashing radio towers. She wondered how much longer standard radio would exist with digital available.
    The skyline was a mass of building s pointing skyward, each lighted differently and with diverse company logos stamped over them. She noticed one for a bank, and she remembered that she needed to pay her credit card bill. She had called them earlier, but they’d said their system was down…
    H er heart skipped a beat.
    She pulled out her cell phone and looked up restaurants in Los Angeles. She called the first result in Google . She got a busy signal. She tried the second result and got the same. She looked up bars in San Francisco—all busy. A clothing store at a mall in Sacramento also had a busy signal, as did television stations, utility companies, and twenty-four-hour pharmacies. She looked up random people in the online phone directories, and their numbers went straight to voice mail. Calling another five, she got the same results each time.
    Jane wasn’t avoiding her.

10
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    When Ian’s plane landed at LAX, he got off with the twenty-five other passengers. He guessed it would be one of the last flights into California.
    His feet hit the terminal carpet at nearly seven o’clock in the evening West Coast time, and he checked his watch, then set it back an hour. As he walked through the terminal, past security, a man in a gray suit was walking toward him. The man placed a suitcase down about ten feet in front of him, and Ian picked it up and walked out of the airport.
    He stood outside in the warm Los Angeles air , glancing over the palm trees, and was glad he wasn’t in Chicago anymore. After growing up in Rio de Janeiro, he felt as though he were being strangled by the compacted cityscape of modern cities, and LA was no different. But at least in the oasis surrounding the airport, trees, open space, and a sweeping twilight sky existed. 
    He walked to the curb , where he saw a car with two men inside. He glanced inside, but walked past them. He walked past a minivan, then came to an Audi with a single female sitting in the driver’s seat. The young blonde was trying to send a text. Looking in through the passenger-side window, he saw that the doors were unlocked. He opened the door and got into the