While Joe hung back by the front door, Sandra sat them down in the living room and told them. Archie said there had to be a mistake. He was sure he’d heard his father come home earlier, that he was already in the house, that he couldn’t have been on Pelican Point and had an accident because he was here. He’d probably gotten into bed next to his mother and she hadn’t even noticed.

Sandra tried to stop him, but he slipped from her arms and ran upstairs to check. And when he failed to find his father, he began to shout his name.

“Dad! Dad! Where are you! Wake up! There’s been a mix-up!”

Tears ran down Katie’s face. A moment later, Archie stood at the top of the stairs and whispered, “I can’t find Dad.”

So Sandra had been their life raft, their port in the storm, their rock—ladies and gentlemen, choose your favorite cliché. She had held them together, done everything she could to support them, even working for assholes like Albert Ruskin and Lisa Carver (not wishing to speak ill of the dead, of course), and there was no way, no how, that a bunch of fucked-up Dinky Toys were going to stop her now.

Sandra was going to find her kids and make sure they were safe.

All she had to do was figure out how to do that.

It was time to look for Ruskin. He was the one most likely to have some answers. He’d rebuffed her before, ignored her when she’d asked to use his phone.

Sandra wasn’t in the mood for any more fucking rebuffing.

Albert Ruskin was on hold with Arrival tech support.

On hold. The assistant to the CEO was on hold.

The company had established a tech support line on day one. A toll-free number Arrival owners could call anytime, day or night, if they were having an issue with their vehicle. The Arrival turned out to be such a trouble-free automobile that the techies hired to stand by the phones complained they often had nothing to do. (There had been a story in the Washington Post that many of them spent their time surfing porn sites.) Most calls came from new owners having trouble getting their cars to understand their commands. Which was why, when someone took delivery of an Arrival, they were required to read aloud several specially formulated sentences, in the language of their choice, that captured every nuance of a person’s speech, regardless of accent or speech defect. But some problems were difficult to predict, like people unfamiliar to New York asking to go to an address on Houston Street, unaware that the New York Houston was pronounced house-ton, not hew-ston, like that city in Texas.