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The only thing Otis really cared about was science, and it had always been Wilson, not Vic, who’d encouraged Otis in his scientific endeavors. Vic was a liberal arts person, so he’d readily allowed Wilson to step in. When Otis was little, Wilson sent him an endless supply of mechanical things: robots, model kits, radios, tape recorders. Otis spent hours taking things apart and reassembling them to see how they worked. He strung together batteries to use as a power source for an electric blanket on Boy Scout camping trips. He fashioned a battery-powered skateboard that Caroline had to confiscate after he fell and split his head open. At one point Wilson sent Otis an old book called The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Otis started experimenting with all sorts of chemicals and even made some chloroform that he administered to Suzi, which knocked her out cold. The Golden Book was sent back to his grandfather. Now, apparently, it was something to do with smoke detectors and alarm clocks.

Gigi kept talking. “Maybe Oats plans to hide those clocks around your house and set them for different times. Wake up, people! It’s happy hour!”

“Not yet,” Vic warned her, and opened another student essay, this one entitled “The Terrible Trip.”

“Hey,” she said in a quieter voice, leaning toward Vic. “Bring Avie out for a riding lesson this weekend. I miss her.”

Vic said that he would. Gigi asking about his children reminded him of where his true priorities lay—that they weren’t here, and they weren’t with Gigi—and after a while he realized that the conference room had lost its magical sheen and had been restored to its drab state; and as usual, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. He told Gigi he’d be skipping happy hour, explaining that Suzi would need him at home.

* * *

In late afternoon, sunlight hung in columns through the canopy trees on Live Oak Plantation Road, which, because they spread out so graciously, never made Vic feel claustrophobic, even though he’d grown up on the prairies of the Midwest. And, turning into Canterbury Hills, he was struck once again by how much he loved his neighborhood, the sheer ordinariness of it. It was the sort of neighborhood he’d always dreamed of living in.

Vic grew up in a house in West Branch, Iowa, that looked, from the outside, as if it had been abandoned. Until he got old enough to mow the grass, it grew so high that the neighbors called a lawn service and took up collections to pay for it. His father, who was always reading and writing and teaching, never seemed to notice the grass at all. And then there was his mother’s rock collection. These weren’t little rocks, or even hunks of interesting and unusual minerals, but big ugly gray-brown boulders she carted home from rivers and creeks in their aged station wagon. She dropped these monstrosities randomly around their overgrown yard, which made mowing even harder for anyone who dared to try it. The Fortress, people called their house.

Vic bided his time until he could get out. He enjoyed his afternoon paper route because he loved studying other people’s neat little homes; smelling the dryer lint from their laundry rooms; imagining the quiet, mundane lives that were lived within. He bet nobody in those houses accidentally fried eggs in a frying pan lined with motor oil as his mother once did after his father had used the pan to catch oil draining from the station wagon.

For years Vic had congratulated himself on the splendid, impulsive idea he’d had of applying to graduate school at FSU. He’d been working in marketing and publicity at the University of Iowa Press, and one snowy day, eating his tasteless sandwich in the lunchroom, he’d happened upon a spread in an old National Geographic about Maclay Gardens in Tallahassee and Iowa was all over for him. And he’d never been sorry about leaving the Midwest behind. Tallahassee was great! Florida was great! Why would anyone not want to live here? Of course, some sourpusses might take issue with not only the hurricanes and rising insurance rates and rampant, heedless development