Dedication

For Leo

1. Erin

1

ERIN

When I met Danny Briggs, I was a long way from home.

I need you to understand how unusual that is for me. I don’t do so well outside of my cozy, secure little burrow and I avoid leaving it at all costs. But my brother needed me so I’d driven for thirteen hours and eight hundred miles, all the way from Vegas to a tiny town in the mountains of Colorado. Now I was sitting in a café, shivering, warming my hands on a mug of coffee and feeling way, way out of my comfort zone.

Some of it was the cold. I was used to Vegas, where winter meant the temperature dropping into the fifties. Up here in Colorado, everything was covered in a thick blanket of snow and the thermometer read nine degrees. I’d driven through the night, fueled by gas station coffee and gummy bears, and the heater in my car doesn’t work. Halfway across Utah, with the stars overhead, I’d had to pull over, empty my suitcase at the side of the road and pull on more clothes. I’d wound up wearing two t-shirts, two shirts and a denim jacket. As I’d climbed into the mountains, it had gotten even colder and I’d stopped at a truck stop and bought a deerstalker with fluffy flaps to go over my ears but I was still freezing.

Some of it, though, was the town. Las Vegas is one giant machine, designed to separate tourists from their money, and I live right at the heart of it. I can feel the data humming through the air all around me, see a million neon lights twinkling under computer command, hear the slot machines clatter and jingle in a carefully-tuned symphony. Heaven. Even better, Vegas is designed to be anonymous. No one knows you, no one wants to know you. Someone like me can just hunker down and be ignored. But this quaint little town was the opposite. I had one bar of signal on my phone and everyone in the café seemed to know each other. I slid lower in my seat and tried to hide behind my laptop screen.

I checked the time: it was eight in the morning, still too early to call my brother and tell him I was in town. I brought up a tech jobs website and started job-hunting but the words blurred together. I took off my glasses and cleaned them but when I put them back on, I still couldn’t focus properly. I was in that dozy, morning-after fug you get after staying awake all night.