Fucksville, Nowhere—aka Barrington—didn’t have an airport in a one-hundred-forty-mile radius.

That wasn’t true. They had a dirt landing strip for crop dusters. I’d passed it on the way. What a shit hole. If I’d chartered something to land there, I would have announced my presence before I even took off.

I wasn’t a big fan of Caddys. I drove a Tesla. Caddys weren’t a thing in San Jose, but it was the best car they’d had at the airport rental terminal. The girl behind the desk swore by it, hand on heart, eyes rolling with remembered pleasure, and I had to say, though it handled like a cruise liner, it drove like a spaceship.

As I passed into town, the sign said the population was 1,209, but there was a fifth space before the one, as if there used to be ten thousand more people.

The terrain was pre-winter blight. Post exploding fall colors and pre winter sting. Brown, leafless, scrubby. The sky was overhung with grey, but with no discernible clouds, as if a screen of dullness hung between the earth and the heavens.

No way the dude who hacked QI4 was in this town. This was a pitstop on the way to some big reveal that would either be humiliating or expensive.

I was a target. A betrayer. I’d gone from black hat to white hat. I’d created a system to thwart them and bragged about it. I was the Everest of the hacker world. They wanted to get me because I was big, I was a challenge, and I was there.

I pulled into a little parking lot in front of two stores. A restaurant and a grocery store. It was the first commercial zoning I’d seen since passing into town.

When I got out, I had a weird feeling I only got when I went to Scott’s Seafood with Fitz. Everyone looked and pretended not to. The room got one eighth quieter. They nudged each other, looked halfway around, pretended to take selfies so they could see over their shoulders.

This was the same—but different. Obviously. Because Fitz and I going to Scott’s was normal. My being in flyover central to find a hacker was crazy.

I went up the wooden steps to a restaurant called Barrington Burgers. It was closed. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock on a Saturday. I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the glass door, angling to see through a slit in the blinds.

Looked all right at first glance. Homey little place. Chairs were pushed in but weren’t upside down on the tables. Maybe it was dinner only?

Then I noticed the alcohol was gone from behind the bar. The plants were dead. Sugar packets were strewn across the wood floor, shredded and balled in a light dusting in the floorboard slats. Only the white packets were ripped. The blue and pink packets were untouched.

Mice. Rats, maybe. Smart fuckers. I wouldn’t have touched that other shit either.

“You looking for someone, mister?”

I turned toward the voice behind me and my god. The prettiest things hid in the most unlikely places. Long, wavy blond hair that reached breasts hidden under a flannel plaid car coat that was cut for men. Jeans. Cowboy boots. No makeup. Wide, full lips with a crease in the bottom one. Angular nose. Freckles. Eyes that went from brown in the center to blue at the outer ring.

She looked away, a little pink in the cheek. Tucked her hair behind her ear. The diamond in her lobe had to be a carat and a half. It looked as real as she did.

“No one in particular,” I said. “I was thinking of staying the night around here.”

I actually hoped I wouldn’t have to, but no one who could hack me lived here, and I needed a place to drop my stuff.

“Oh, uh. There’s a hotel on Oakwood.” She pointed in a general direction. Her hand was fine, delicate, with white tape around three finger joints.

I took out my phone. She stared at it. Were they still using flip phones in Nowhereville or something?

“Do you know what it’s called? I can look it up.”

“The connection isn’t great around here. You just go right out of the lot. Go for about a mile and a half, and you’ll see a gate onto Oakwood. Take that until you see it.”

“What’s it called?” I could GPS the name more easily than stare at my odometer.

“Bedtimey Inn? But like I said, the connection’s pretty spotty around here.” She jerked her thumb behind her toward the little convenience store. “I’m helping out at the grocery. Want to call from there and see if they have any room?”

“I’ll just drive over.”

She barely moved, but I could tell I’d snubbed her by refusing her offer.

“I’m sure you know what you want.” Her eyelids fluttered. Her lashes were blond at the tips and darker at the roots.

Strange looking girl. Beautiful and exotic. Just a touch younger than me. Her nipples were probably the palest pink fading into bronze at the center. Or the other way around. I wanted to know.

It was the wanting that tweaked a thought, a memory, a flash of déjà vu. It tapped a turtle’s shell, and though the animal heard the tap, it didn’t come out.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

“Um, did you go to Montgomery High?”

“No.”

“Do you work at the distro center off the interstate? I sub there sometimes.”

“No.” I couldn’t help smirking. The notion that I was from here, working at the distribution center off the interstate, was ridiculous, and I couldn’t hide it. “You just look familiar. But I’ve never been around here before.”

I almost asked her if she’d ever been to Silicon Valley or suggested we’d met at MIT, but why push it? If someone that beautiful had ever left Barrington, she never would have come back.

“Okay.” She folded her bottom lip in thought, and I knew where the crease had come from. It was so much sexier as the result of a habit than a genetic detail. “You sure you don’t want to call first?” Another thumb jerk toward the little grocery store.

“I’m good.”

A shiny blue pickup pulled up in front of the store. She waved at it. A guy in a baseball cap rolled the window down to give us a short wave and a dirty look that may have all been in my head. He looked to be in his late twenties, but hard twenties, with skin the product of sun and tobacco. A hound leaned over his lap and stuck his head out, giving a bark when he saw us.

The girl turned back to me. “Bye, then.”

“Bye.”

She took two steps down to the lot, blond waves flapping like Old Glory on a fall day.

“Do you have a name?” I called to her.

She turned and walked backward. “Harper.”

“Harper.” I said it more to myself than her.

She didn’t ask me my name but went to the truck, gave the dog a pat, the guy a couple of words, then bounced up to the store. I flipped the key to the Caddy around my finger, watching her. When she disappeared, Baseball Cap opened the car door, watching me. The dog poured out and ran up the steps to the girl.

Harper.

I waved to the guy in the cap. He went toward the grocery store after his dog without waving back. I got in the Caddy and turned the key, but though I laid my hand on the gearshift, I couldn’t move until I said in the car what I couldn’t say outside.

“Wow.”