Page 70 of Gone Before Goodbye

She looks at the screen and keeps it close. She recognizes that facial expression too.

Marc is scared.

“Whatever you do,” he says to her, “don’t get on that helicopter.”

The cold rips through her. “Why not?”

“There is an abandoned iron ore mine two miles away. No one knows how deep the hole is. Five, six thousand feet at least.”

“So?”

“So if you get on that helicopter, they will throw you into it.”

“Marc—”

“You don’t understand these people.”

“And you do?”

“You performed facial surgery to change Ragoravich’s looks, Maggie. They can’t let you live. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

The knock on the bathroom door startles her.

“Let’s go, Doctor McCabe,” Brovski says. “I’m losing my patience.”

“Maggie,” AI Marc says, “you have to run.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The alarm startles Sharon.

It is late, way past anyone rational’s sleep time, but Sharon is awake. She usually is. She requires very little sleep, or at least, she gets very little sleep. Her mind has a tendency to run too hot. It is hard to shut it off. At one point, someone had suggested meditation, but just the thought of clearing the mind or turning off her brain or whatever stupid-speak people use merely to describe this awful experience caused Sharon anxiety to the point of a near panic attack. She doesn’t buy it anyway. Asking any human to stop thinking is akin to asking them to stop their heart from beating. You can’t. Not really. Sharon understands that better than most. Most people could control their thoughts in one way or another. Or experience mental fatigue and exhaustion.

Sharon could not.

She’d been reading a novel in the leather chair in her bedroom. Cole is in bed. Oddly enough, while she can rip through journals and manuals and technical books, she reads novels slowly, leisurely, making sure every scene comes to life in full color in her head. This is the closest she gets to shutting down—distracting her brain with fiction rather than problem-solving.

Sharon sits up when she hears the alarm. Her bookmark has Edward Hopper’sThe Sheridan Theatreon it. Sharon’s favorite painting.Maggie had bought it for her at the Newark Museum gift shop when they visited in May.

Sharon places the Hopper bookmark between pages ninety-two and ninety-three, closes the book, rises.

Her mind is a constantly whirring thing, her brain overheating—it makes life unbearable in many ways. It makes it impossible for a man to stay with her. To love her. Tad had tried. In the end it hadn’t worked. Her… Is it a condition? Hard to say. Everything is called a condition now. You shake your leg, you have some big diagnosis. Sharon doesn’t buy it all. Is she on the spectrum or autistic or something like that? Undoubtedly. Does it matter? She isn’t sure. But this is how she was built and so her “condition” (let’s just call it that for now) eventually drove Tad away. She hadn’t expected him to become bitter. That had taken her aback. But she knows—and not in a pathetic, needy, pitiful way—that she is unlovable. She could be a decent mom and daughter and sister. She could be a pretty good friend. But her condition makes her unworthy of true companionship or love.

So be it.

The alarm sounds again, jangling her nerves. Sharon is a cautious person. You have to be in this business. Every software or AI enhancement she creates has backdoors and security traps, even the ones she’s provided to the government. Especially those. She could destroy the programs at any time. She could see whether someone tampered with them…

… and she could see if someone tried to delete them.

That—Sharon can see immediately when she fires up her laptop to check the alarm status—is what happened here.

Someone has tried to delete the griefbot on Maggie’s phone.

This is not good.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Sharon had done as Maggie asked. Up until now, she has respected her sister’s desire for privacy. Maggie had gone up to New York City to see Evan Barlow.Barlow had offered Maggie some kind of high-paying but secretive work. Maggie had told Sharon that she couldn’t say more because it would violate HIPAA and privacy clauses. Fair enough. Sharon let it go.

Sharon accepted the financial good fortune that had come their way, even though she knew that there had to be a price to pay somewhere for it.