She nodded, bemused. “And the other?”

“I want you to write about everything you gave up to be Ampersand’s interpreter, and why you did it. But again, bigger-picture thing. Focus on how you’ve applied your schooling in linguistics, if you can. Also, call him ‘Jude,’ not ‘Ampersand.’ Have this for me by EOD.”

“EOD?”

“End of the day,” he said with a chuckle. “5:00 P.M.”

She opened the laptop and turned it on. “Is this just to keep me busy?”

“Let’s just say I’m thinking with a mind to the future.”

The computer made its trademark bong Apple start-up noise. She looked at it as though touching it the wrong way might make it disappear in a puff of smoke.

“If you give me a draft of each by the time I get back, which is EOD, I’ll take you out somewhere. Actually, no, I’ll take you out either way, but we’ll pretend like this is an incentive. I want to see what you can do.”

“Take me out where?”

“Wherever you want. Taco Bell? Olive Garden? Cheesecake Factory? Benihana? And I’ll make sure we don’t have to wait.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she said, her voice growing quiet. “I don’t need . . .”

“I do, though. This is what I should have been doing all along.” He stood up. “Besides, what’s the point of having a rich boyfriend if you don’t get to skip the line sometimes?”

She batted her eyelids like a nervous butterfly. “Boyfriend?”

He kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose and then tapped it with his finger. “Boop.”

They said their goodbyes, and he went out the door, and the second it closed behind him, he nearly shattered.

Kaveh drove about halfway to Los Alamitos before pulling off the side of the road and into a McDonald’s parking lot. He turned off the engine, sat there for a solid two minutes, and then dialed. The phone rang a couple of times, the telltale ring of a European phone number, until it clicked from an answer. He let out a deep breath, tried not to sound as angry as he felt, and said, “This is Kaveh. I’m on my burner.”

“Wie geht’s? How’s it going, man?”

Nils was talking to him like they were about to share their fantasy football picks. It was a real, genuine struggle not to sound angry. “I’ve seen better days.”

“I can see that. Glad I got you on the horn. I was surprised enough to see one of the aliens got a name from my freaking grandmother’s side, but ‘Sassanian’? It took me a minute, but then I was like, I wonder who gave him that name? Is ‘Nikola’ a family name, too?”

“Not unless I’m related to Nikola Tesla.”

“Oh, nice. Is this some strategy to get on Elon Musk’s good side?”