40

Their moods for music were always synchronized, whether Beatles or Beethoven, Glenn Miller or Glenn Gould. This night, they settled on the clear and nimble piano work of David Benoit, his soft jazz rather than anything too progressive.

A three-beet salad followed by pappardelle with scallops in a light saffron sauce was a dinner to be lingered over, accompanied by a dry white wine as bright on the tongue as the music on the ear.

They ate at the kitchen table, for the small house offered no formal dining room. Crackled amber-glass cups, which matched the globes on the porch lamps, held the table candles, fracturing the flames into sinuosities of light and shadow that flowed unceasing across the table and up the walls. In this atmosphere, Ed Casper's uplit face seemed like that of a mysterious medium or magician with knowledge of real magic rather than tricks.

Their conversation always ranged over a wide array of subjects, literally from cabbages to kings, although music and literature and art and history were those that most enlivened Ed. On this occasion, he soon turned the talk to modern physics, quantum mechanics—hidden dimensions, spooky effects at a distance, parallel worlds—about which Michelle had no understanding and of which she assumed that she had little interest.

Ed was, however, both a splendid raconteur and gifted with the ability to make the complex simple. Soon Michelle was captivated by his portrait of a universe stranger than anything Hollywood could ever splash across the screen. In a while she realized that he was not engaged in the usual casual conversation, that he'd come here intent upon explaining—and convincing her—that an infinite multiverse existed, filled with parallel Earths. She had never before seen him so intense—or intense at all.

For dessert, she served each of them a plate with two cheeses and six fresh plump figs, along with a final glass of wine.

After a bit of cheese and a single fig, Ed extracted an object from a pocket of his sport coat and put it on the table. It somewhat resembled an iPhone.

"This," he said, "is the most valuable but also most dangerous technology in history. A quantum miracle. The key to everything. It can undo tragedy. It's an instrument of evil in the wrong hands, but it can also make you whole again, dear girl. You and your precious family, whole again. It can bring them back to you."