Although the last thing Shawn wanted to do was stop at the grocery story to get food for dinner, especially since it meant paying for food for Luke, he did it anyway. He was in that good a mood. Not only had he made a single day’s largest progress in his document unraveling, but Sana had already run a second sequencing of the tooth-pulp mitochondrial DNA, and the sequence was exactly the same as the first. Thus, all around it was by far their most successful day in relation to the ossuary, and such progress bode well for papers in the not-too-distant future.

“I had an idea,” Sana said, as she and Shawn loaded the groceries into the trunk of a yellow cab.

“Really?” Shawn questioned jokingly. “Such a novel occur rence.”

Sana hauled off and smacked Shawn playfully with a package of paper towels.

In such a playful attitude, they arrived home. While Shawn paid the fare, Sana walked to the rear of the taxi to get the groceries. As she lifted them to the curb, she thought about Luke and wondered how he was going to act. She truly had no idea, and her thoughts ranged between anger on one extreme to humor on the other. As for how he had acted in the immediacy of the episode, she felt certain he’d be embarrassed, and she hoped he planned to apologize, as she had strongly suggested, so that the incident could be put behind them. After having thought about his response on and off most of the day, Sana still considered it as over-the-top inappropriate. “Satan’s whore,” she murmured inaudibly. Such language coming from such an angelic-appearing person seemed shocking to her.

“Do you have the groceries?” Shawn’s voice rang out. He’d finished paying the driver.

“I could use a hand,” Sana yelled back.

Shawn appeared around the side of the taxi and took the two bags that Sana had already lifted from the trunk. She fished out the third and last and slammed the trunk’s lid with her elbow.

As they walked up to the front door, Sana got her circle of keys from her purse. “Fine time for one to be thinking of this now,” Shawn commented. “I think we finished the final bottle of wine last night.”

“If you want, you can walk over to Sixth Avenue later and get some for tonight,” Sana suggested. “Our celebrating that you mentioned to Jack is going to be rather lame unless we get some wine.”

“Maybe I’ll invite Luke,” Shawn said. “It would be good for him to get out of the house.”

“That’s nice of you,” Sana said, and meant it. At the same time she wondered what Shawn would say if she told him that Luke had called her “Satan’s whore” the night before. When Shawn was angry, he had a sailor’s vocabulary.