She lets herself into the shop, wraps her hand in one of those geometric silk scarves all the docents wear around their necks, and starts pecking at the register. They haven’t changed the code, and while it has only $200 in twenties and fives and tens, she finds the jewelry case key is still under the cash drawer. She clears out the bracelets, takes a handful of cufflinks and Wright-inspired watches and the silver letter openers. As she grabs a fistful of rings she hears another hit, but it sounds different from the quick snap of plastic and metal and glass, the extinguishing of filaments. It comes from somewhere behind her, toward Wright’s studio and the parked car. This one is loud, a boom thick enough to echo up the hills. Then everything goes dark: the green numbers on the register, the balustrade lights, the remaining overhead floods. Even the lamp glowing in Wright’s studio—the one the tour guides insist they keep on all night, like some sort of beacon—stutters off.

“Jason?” she calls into the dark. “Are you all right?” She hears nothing, sees nothing. Then she catches a movement in the window. She starts, but realizes it is only her own reflection, a dark shadow against the creeping glow of the city. She watches herself for a moment, until the horizon goes bright with red and blue.

THIRD

Let me remind you of our timeline. We’re a few games into the season, a few billion years into Arizona’s geological history. At this point, like a determined left-hander learning to switch-hit, the ocean floor rose. At first, the batter’s success is sporadic and slow, but then—the crotchety old hitting coach barking instructions, yelling at the batter about his feet, his grip, his eye, his goddamn eye—the player gets the hang of it, and the net of the batting cage’s far boundary starts to push out in a steady pulse. Contact, contact, contact, says the crack of the bat, says the creak of rising land. What the fuck did you do, Herb Allison yells into the phone when Jason calls from the precinct at 2:00 a.m. What the hell, Woody Botter hollers when Jason walks into the clubhouse the next morning, looking as rough as a rosin bag after a rainstorm. He did what? Liana asks when a reporter, waiting at the edge of her property, shouts out a question about her husband’s trespassing charge. No comment, she corrects herself, hustling into her car and off to school. That’s their promise, hers and Jason’s. That wasn’t just Twitter gossip Deidre heard: the picture-perfect marriage to the elementary school teacher? A source, and not just a wined-up left fielder, confirmed they’re split. She gets the house with the brand-new batting cage in the backyard. She gets every penny promised in the generous prenup, so long as she keeps saying: No comment.