Steve smiled. “Have you eaten dinner yet? Felicia’s made her infamous pot roast and you can’t let me suffer through that alone.”

Juan opened a desk drawer and held up a sack lunch that he’d neglected to eat earlier. “Sorry, I’ve got food that if I don’t eat, it will end up smelling worse than my gym socks. And besides, I’ve got a date with a forty-thousand-year-old sample who’s screaming to tell me all about her genome.”

Steve levered up from his seat and rapped his knuckles on Juan’s desk. “You sure? What if I got Felicia to have one of her friends come over? She’s almost certainly going to be younger than that specimen of yours, and if you’re lucky, she might be a bit livelier.”

Juan laughed but shook his head. “Another time. Say hi to Felicia for me.”

“All right, my friend. Stay well.”

Juan barely noticed the sound of the door closing behind Steve. He was already lost once more in the latest sequencing data.

###

It was just before dawn as Nate Carrington hit the midpoint of his five-mile morning run. As he did every morning, he veered away from the jogging path toward the small unobtrusive cemetery. The manicured path was lit by the waning glow of the nearby street lights. Early-morning dew glistened on the blades of grass as he made a beeline for a gravesite he’d visited thousands of times.

Nate breathed in the scent of the freshly cut grass as a light breeze cooled the sweat from his brow. He knelt in front of a modest tombstone and recited the words his wife had said to him almost every morning they’d woken next to each other. “Don’t kiss me, I’ve got morning breath.”

Nate dragged his fingers gently over the dew-covered tombstone and lovingly touched his wife’s name: Madison Carrington. It had been almost twenty years since she’d passed, and not a day had gone by that he didn’t think of her.

Sitting on his heels at her gravesite, Nate closed his eyes and thirty years seemed to vanish. It felt like only yesterday that he’d first met the shy blonde girl with the brilliant smile. He was only eighteen and wasn’t even thinking about love or soul mates—but from the moment he laid eyes on her, he knew she was the one.

They married six months later.

And though he spent the next ten years coming and going from Godforsaken places all over the world as a medic for the Army’s Special Forces, every time he came home, Madison was there to greet him with that beautiful smile.

Even when he rushed home from Afghanistan on emergency leave after getting the call that she had terminal cancer, she greeted him with that same smile. Just as beautiful, despite her pain.