“Seymour misses you.” I held up the cat as a demonstration. Seymour dangled in my hands, a dead weight, not acknowledging my claim. “And yes, I miss you, too. But I’m not going to tell you to come home before you’re done. You’re doing good work.”

“I’m doing grunt work,” he said. “It’s not the same thing, even though I appreciate your faith in me.”

“It looks good on a résumé and it keeps you working in your field, which means you don’t have to look elsewhere for your scaled delights, and I don’t have to move someplace with more snakes.”

Graham smiled, fond and concerned. “That’s my girl,” he said.

“Always,” I said, and smiled back.

Graham and I met in college, when we’d taken the same English elective to round out our course load. He’d been planning to become a herpetologist; I’d been planning to become a computer scientist. We’d both been derailed by the world, but we’d held on to the core of our disciplines, and we’d held on to each other. The make-outs were nice. The sex was nice, too. The friendship, though, the understanding and affection … those were better.

After school, I’d decided eighty-hour weeks and nervous breakdowns weren’t for me and gone into customer service instead, while Graham had gone to work in the research division of a large software company. His team did general science, with the goal of finding ways to apply that science to new technological breakthroughs for his employers. As long as they were willing to let him keep spending all his free time on his beloved snakes, that was fine with him.

The only bad thing he’d ever done to me was Roxanna. She wasn’t a coworker, but she was a colleague, and he’d been the one who urged her to go to Burning Man, just to try it out. Without him, Lucas might have found a girlfriend I was less inclined to drown in the nearest body of standing water.

Oh, well. Nobody’s perfect.

“How are you holding up?” he asked. “Is it … you know?”

“I’m okay.” I shrugged. “A little shaken, I guess? I’m having to ask myself a lot of questions. I don’t know that I’m going to like all the answers I get. But I’m okay.”

Graham looked at me oddly. “You didn’t answer my second question.”

“I need you to come home.”

It was the sort of bald, needy declaration that rarely arose between us. Graham blinked, looking nonplussed. Then he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess you answered it after all. Is tomorrow soon enough?”

“It should be,” I said. “Is it going to be a problem?”

His laugh was unsteady. “Honestly, no. A few of my teammates have asked about you. They wanted me to find out whether you recognized the signal.”