“Makes sense. What do you want to do? Should we call Avery?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, read this, then search the rest of the house.”

Peyton agreed, and they sat down on the worn couch in the living room. It was in the low forties outside, and it felt even colder inside. The small heater wasn’t enough. She glanced at the fireplace, but decided the smoke it would generate would be too much of a risk. She opted instead to drape the thick quilt from the couch over her, and she slid closer to Desmond and spread it across him as well. The warmth of their body heat slowly filled the small space under the quilt.

He studied her face. She knew what he was thinking: this was just like Palo Alto, that small house they had shared fifteen years ago. She felt it too, them slipping back into that place they had been in together. But there was too much going on for her to even think about that. She lifted the pages and began to read.

Chapter 77

Chapter 77

My father’s name was Robert Moore. He was a scientist at perhaps the most important time and place for scientists—a moment when science ended a war. And changed the world.

On that day, in July 1945, he slept only one hour, dressed in his best suit, and drove through the desert to the test site. At the gate, security made him step out of his car, which they searched extensively.

The mood across the base was tense. Inside the control station, the project director was bordering on a breakdown. Several times, General Leslie Groves had to guide the man outside, where they walked in the darkness, through the rain, talking, the general assuring him all would go as planned.

Shortly before five thirty a.m., the countdown began. The seconds were the longest of Robert’s life.

The team had nicknamed the device the Gadget. It was the product of half a decade of work by some of the greatest scientific minds ever assembled. That morning, the Gadget sat atop a one-hundred-foot-tall steel tower. Desert stretched in every direction. The control station where the scientists waited was nearly six miles away. Even at that distance, Robert donned welder’s goggles and focused through the tinted glass. He saw only darkness in the seconds before the countdown reached zero.

The flash of white light came first. It lasted for a few seconds, then a wave of heat passed through him, soaking his face and hands. When the wall of light faded, he could make out a column of fire rising from the site, expanding quickly.

The cloud broke through a temperature inversion at seventeen thousand feet—which most scientists had thought impossible. For minutes after the explosion, the cloud rose into the sky, reaching the substratosphere at over thirty-five thousand feet.