James’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about, doofus?”
“Shakespeare,” Martha said. “
Sophie cut her off. Talk of sexual assault and Greek gods didn’t pair well with pasta. “Cassandra, that’s enough.”
Martha said the prayer and then dug into her spaghetti. “She sounds too happy for a machine. And I don’t like the way she says ‘always.’”
Cassandra was silent, but the blue light continued to pulse — like she was mulling over the conversation going on around her.
James fished his iPhone out of the pocket of his jeans and set it at the base of the pyramid so both devices were touching. “Check this out.” He entered something into the phone as the screen lit up. He referred periodically to the instruction book. “It syncs with your phone and charges it at the same time.”
Sophie stood well away from the table, her arms folded, back to the kitchen wall. Martha was right. It was creepy to think that a plastic box that was somehow connected to the mysterious, indescribable Cloud could hear and understand everything they were saying.
No, Peter would not like this at all.
The Cloud was no mystery to her husband. It was his workspace, insofar as such a thing was possible. A brilliant retired Naval officer turned software engineer. He was in communications now, working on a government contract at the labs near their home in Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago.
They’d been married only a short while in the great scheme of things — long enough, though, considering her growing baby bump. But Sophie had known Peter Li for more than twenty years. Her late husband, Allen, had served with him for many years, as his XO aboard the USS
Sea duty is long and lonely for sailors and the spouses they leave ashore. Peter’s wife, Anne, and Sophie had formed a bond of sisterhood while their husbands were away for those long deployments at sea that kept them in touch even when the Navy assigned them to opposite sides of the globe. Anne and Sophie were the first to discuss the possibility of their husbands working together post-Navy for Dexter & Reed in Lake Forest. Peter was recruited by the company and he wanted Allen to come work with him — to be his executive officer again. It meant Allen would have to give up on the idea of becoming an admiral, but it also meant more time with the family. The wives worked out the details, and Sophie and Allen had moved from Norfolk to Illinois, where they bought a home across the street from the larger house owned by Peter and Anne in the same Fort Sheridan neighborhood — something neither family could have afforded on a Navy salary, captain or admiral. Both women came from money, so they’d always bought the houses while their husbands provided military benefits and worthy role models for the kids.
The situation had been idyllic for exactly five months, living as neighbors on the shores of Lake Michigan in historic hundred-year-old houses… until Anne Li suddenly passed away from an aneurysm.
The funeral was a week shy of their thirtieth anniversary. Their son was grown, with a family of his own. Sophie and Allen had looked after Peter after the son returned to his responsibilities in Seattle. Pancreatic cancer took Allen a year later — at which point the two dear friends had turned to each other. It took them another two years to admit that they might carry on with more than weekly cribbage games and pizza nights with Sophie’s teenage children.
Peter had taken her to dinner, an actual date at the Gallery — her favorite place in Lake Forest. He’d stammered a lot for a man who’d commanded thousands of men and ships of war, and then gone on to confess that he’d not even held hands with another woman since he’d started dating Anne in high school.
