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a sheet of ruled paper from the back of her book and unfolded it.
    "Here. I kept this. It's his handwriting."
    Sarah lifted an eyebrow. "Did you get a lock of his hair, too?"
    "Seriously, look at it. This is where he was trying to explain number twelve, and he just totally lost me."
    Sarah took the paper from her. The script was surprisingly neat, even elegant. She found herself intrigued by it. As if she might read some expression of the man in his equations.
    She folded it up and gave it back to Amy without further comment. Will had grown restless, and Sarah attempted a last swipe to clean his mouth, then lowered him to the floor.
    "He forgets to eat, too."
    "Who?"
    "John!"
    "Oh."
    "I've taken lunch in to him sometimes and it sits there all afternoon."
    Her mouth flew open in a great gaping yawn. She slid the Coke can aside and dropped her head on the table and mumbled, "I'm so tired. I wish they'd come home."
    That's when Sarah suggested she go on home, leaving Sarah to finish out the evening. Amy took to the idea immediately, particularly when Sarah reassured her she wanted none of the baby-sitting money for herself, would gladly turn over to Amy all monies paid and received for an evening of suffering Will.
    But Sarah was secretly glad when Amy left, and she carried Will around the kitchen and the parlor, talking to him the way one talks to things that listen mutely. She tempted her luck with a bottle of formula, and Will took a little of that, too. Finally, it seemed that sleep was winning out; his head rested heavily on her shoulder and his fingers slipped from her hair. But when she went upstairs to the nursery and approached the crib and attempted to separate him from her, even though his eyes were closed and his breath was giving way to slow, deep rhythms, he protested and grew agitated, and she could see he might easily throw himself back into a state.
    In truth, Sarah was no more eager to part from him than he was to part from her, and so she turned out the lights and closed the door and went downstairs with Will curled up on her shoulder. She found her backpack on the floor in the parlor and pulled out a book, then looked around for a place to alight.
    It was curiosity that drew her to John Wilde's study that night, and undoubtedly a wish to know him obliquely, to discover him refracted through the places he inhabited and the words he wrote and the books he read. There would be no harm in knowing him like this, with intent so innocent, while she might still remain unseen and unrevealed to him.
    A trestle table had been set up to accommodate his computer, fax machine, and stacks of paper and files and books. She approached and stood for some time trying to make sense of the clutter. It did not surprise her to find that nearly everything was written in equations; all the notes and scribbles and printed pages were mathematical computations or graphs or measurements of some kind. Very little was expressed in words, and what was made no sense to her—"quantum memory," "atom-cavity state transfer," "vortex creation."
    She was still standing in the shadows swaying gently with the baby when she noticed the rumpled throw-covered sofa shoved against the side wall below shelves of books. She was tired now, and the old sofa seemed particularly inviting. She flicked on the table lamp and sank down into the sagging seat. She worked off her shoes, then lay back and shifted Will onto her stomach.
    She checked her watch. It was nearly eleven. She would read for a while, then put Will to bed and wait in the parlor until they returned. She opened her book.

CHAPTER 9
    Susan Wilde had always succeeded at anything she put her mind to. That's why little Will baffled her so, because he hadn't learned yet, hadn't been told, just how competent, how accomplished his mother was, how she always got it so right. For four months now John had watched her throw herself into the task of motherhood, but she confronted it like a battle, slogged