The stew turned out nice, punchy from the Worcestershire and paprika, and the potatoes kept their shape. I always had to thread the needle with root vegetables; Granny got incensed if they required too much force from her dentures, but the kids would cry, "Ew, gross!" if either the potatoes or carrots were mushy.

I was just containerizing leftovers when the doorbell rang.

I walked to the door like a boxer in the middle rounds, dragging but with hard-trained reserves still available.

It was Quaid and Piper Jackson.

"Where y'been?" the former asked. "We haven't seen you for two days. Durwood's worried sick you're going to lose your base tan."

I gestured back behind me. "I really needed to catch up here. Zach, Karen, the floors..."

As if buttressing my excuse, a crash sounded upstairs. It had the chipping tinks of glass, but ended heavily. A bed falling through its frame?

I pivoted to go check—the boxer answering the bell—but Quaid caught my wrist.

"Nope," he said. "You and I have a date."

I crimped my brow at the word, which seemed from a different era—for me, for the world.

"Thanks. I can't, though. With the kids, and today I just realized Granny—"

"Kids are accounted for." He extended his arm theatrically toward Piper. "I brought a babysitter."

The hacker didn't looked thrilled with the label, but stepped inside nonetheless. I opened my shoulders to consider my kids, who'd come downstairs at visitors. Zach and Piper weren't so different in size.

She and I had come a long way since Shop-All. Piper had joined the Third Chance effort fully, embracing the mission to thwart Rivard. I had no qualms trusting her with the kids.

But did I trust them with her?

Hedging, I said, "I—okay, I'll just finish cleaning up dinner."

"Go, I know how to load a dishwasher," Piper said. "What time they bed down, ten?"

Quaid had fetched my purse from the coffee table jumble and was looping it over my shoulder.

"Ten would be fine," I found myself saying, drifting onto the porch. "Karen should read for twenty minutes, and ideally Zach—"

"Zach'll be busy." Piper started the door closing. "Every teen should know how to code a simple bubble sort."

Before I could ask what a bubble sort was or caution her about Zach's "combative learning style" (his principal's term), Quaid was ushering me into the Vanagon.

I asked where we were going.

Quaid moved a bazooka gallantly from the passenger seat to the floorboard. "Same place everybody goes on a date. The movies!"

I felt weightless as we pulled away from the house, like a plaster cast of my shoulders was being lifted off and evaporated. Quaid drove east through dark stoplights and past abandoned cars, some ablaze, making liberal use of the horn.

He updated me on goings-on at CitySun. The kernel handoff was still on for Thursday. They'd all gone on a scouting trip to the rock quarry where it was to occur—a sandy, open space where neither side would be able to conceal much.

By and large, Quaid had been enjoying the Mice. Hatch he found a particular delight. He'd advised the giant Libertarian to run for city council—if and when popular elections resumed.

"I told him, heck, be the change." Quaid took a hand off the wheel to raise one fist. "Blowing it up got messy. Try fixing it from within."

I motioned that he should drive with both hands. "Sounds like you're having a time."

"When you're used to conversing with Durwood, it's a low bar. Hey—I even had a discussion with that admirer of yours. Darryl? Gary, was it?"

He knew the name, but I supplied it anyway.

"Garrison."

"Right, that's it. You know he's a graphic designer by trade?"

"Yes. A digital artist."

Quaid chuckled. "Let's not get carried away, McGill. He makes websites. They're not clamoring for his stuff at the Guggenheim."

Not keen to pursue this banter, I changed the subject.

"How's Durwood been?"

"Oh, cheerless as ever. Last night he made us all sleep down in the cellar. He's convinced he's seeing 'irregular surveillance activity' on those patrols of his. Thinks Rivard is planning some sneak attack."

"What if he's right?"

Quaid shook his head dismissively. "We've been keeping the Mice out of sight, Rivard has no idea. Wood's just being stubborn and paranoid."

We were exiting the highway now, joining a traffic knot at the rear. I peered ahead of the cars and spotted a giant white canvas rising from the horizon.

"Wait," I said, "you weren't serious about a movie?"

"I was indeed." Quaid cocked his tongue in one cheek. "You know drive-ins are making a comeback? It's a thing."

He offered his analysis of the phenomenon, which he conceded was counterintuitive—traveling to an isolated field to park among strangers, to make a sitting duck of yourself for two hours. Why did people come—even amid reports of theft and occasional shootings? They came for each other. They came out of a defiant, communal need.

Quaid eased the Vanagon over soft-crunching grass, around a jagged line of bumpers to a speaker at the end of a row. Sweetcorn stretched away to their right, restless gray by the light of the hundred-foot screen.

To their left sat a Buick, whose body was half primer and half burgundy paint. Quaid pulled the Vanagon level and glanced sideways through its smoked window.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "Who's in that car?"

He set the parking brake. "Nobody. A family. Dad passing a tub of popcorn back to the rugrats."

I frowned as a preview started on-screen. I didn't for one second believe that Buick contained a family—this was exactly the sort of lie Quaid told to head off my questions.

Reaching back to the cabin, he pulled a six-pack from underneath a mounted rifle. He twisted off a pair of beers and offered me one.

I took it.

Do you ever just...deserve a thing? Some vice or indulgence, that cheesy TV show or third chocolate-chip cookie?

The first gulp was divine going down, sour gold.

I must've shed five points of blood pressure with every moment in Quaid's presence. Blocks of muscle in my back came unstuck. It wasn't protected I felt, but simply at ease in the presence of another grownup. Granny didn't count. The Anarchy largely washed out with the rest of cable news' horrors for Granny, who at times felt like a third child.

Quaid, though, saw the same dangers I saw. He saw them and wasn't perturbed, and this comfort—rightly or wrongly—rubbed off on me.

I said, feet resting on the bazooka, "I'm surprised Durwood let you take the Vanagon."

"He wasn't thrilled." Quaid tuned the radio to the drive-in audio. "What can he do? My name's on the title same as his."

The movie began. Quaid reached across the cupholders for my hand, and I rotated my palm up, allowing his fingers between mine. The warm touch jolted all through my body.

The towering screen hung slightly askew, its canvas tattered at two corners. A Summer Without Regret opened at the ocean, twenty-something characters standing in a frothy surf, speaking into a pink sunrise.

The film, which had topped the box office charts for months, was a more or less tame story of recent college graduates preparing to depart for far-flung jobs. Its appeal seemed to lie in its blandness. Gossip, infidelity, awkward silence—minor matters nobody had energy to fret over in their own lives anymore.

"Alright, I'm calling it," Quaid said. "This guy here"—pointing with his free hand—"ends up with the redhead. Notice how they're all bashing him now? Textbook reversal of fortune."

He commented liberally over the course of the film. On poorly delivered lines. On camera angles—as governor, he'd ridden shotgun on the filming of a PBS documentary about Boston Common and fancied himself a bit of an auteur. On other plot foreshadowings.

When he predicted a minor character's suicide fifteen minutes before it happened, the Buick took offense.

"Could you shut up? Trying to enjoy a movie here, you—" snarled a voice, adding several curses.

I flattened against my seat back. That hadn't been the voice of a dad with popcorn in his teeth.

Quaid called over, "If you didn't see that one coming, you oughta upgrade to the full lobotomy. Then you'll enjoy everything."

Chuckles came from the car in front of us. I peeked through the night at the Buick, at its partially painted doors that resembled sinister Rothkos, waiting for them to swing angrily open.

Maybe it was a family. Maybe there was a wife inside whispering to a husband, begging him to return the gun to the glove compartment, watching him—like I was watching Quaid now.

I said, quiet, "Provoking people in his historical moment is awfully dumb."

He glanced to the cabin arsenal. "If it comes to it, I believe we'll manage." When my expression stayed stern, he added, "But I take your point."

We were looking at each other, the spell of the movie broken. I said a prayer that the Buick let Quaid's quip go.

Then, while I was thinking about Him, I said another prayer that this handoff with Rivard went according to plan. I knew the guys had beaten Rivard in previous missions, but the world had changed since then.

Now you didn't get robbed when you went on vacation; you got your house stolen.

I didn't want them, but tears came anyway.

"McGill, this is all going to sort itself out," Quaid said—that uncanny ability of his to read others' emotions. "We're the professionals, we will finish this out. You did your part. You put us in position."

There was no smirk or boast in this. His mouth was a straight, earnest line. His palm seemed to grow another crease, taking my hand in deeper.

We leaned together over the cupholders and kissed.

We kissed until the sweetcorn and the Buick and A Summer Without Regret faded away, into the Vanagon cabin, staggering over crates of grenades, fevered, kicking off shoes and pants.