Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series by Mary Ann Rivers Page A

change felt likemoving forward. Spending evenings with his parents had taken on some small weight of dignity.
    Such fragile dignity, then, would have to armor him for his return to his old team in Beijing, buoy him so that he could take on a meaningful life again and regrow himself from the grafts of his previous life before Ohio.
    Safe from fuckups, spectacular or otherwise.
    He realized the sun had nearly moved to the right spot. He watched the angle of light over the lake, how the rough surface of the water reflected back the midday light. Then he looked at the long, low warehouse building that was a short quarter mile from the lake and caught the same angle of sun.
    Rather, should catch the same angle. The building’s roof was covered with solar panels in a traditionally fixed array. But when Hefin visually compared the reflection of light on the lake to any play of light on the banks of dark panel cells, it was clear the array was missing out on the longest and most powerful hours of sunshine.
    In Beijing, he had worked on a project developing what his team had called “sunflower panels.” Using photosensitive robotic motors as mounts they called “stems,” smaller solar panels were arrayed to the stems. The panels followed the sun throughout the day, like a field of sunflowers. The arrays were lighter, and a large building like the warehouse would need fewer of them because they collected energy so efficiently. In their own way, too, they were … pretty. Pretty for robotic solar panels, anyway. Hefin had privately found them rather poetic.
    He couldn’t help estimate how many sunflowers the warehouse would need, where to plant the stems.
    He let himself calculate until the angle of sun changed again.
    He let himself think of the long nights in his team’s favorite bar in the Wudaoying Hutong zone in the Dongchen District, making design sketches on cocktail napkins and downing cold butter-pale ale against the humid evenings.
    He’d run stairs in Beijing, too, climbed skyscrapers so new and ambitious sometimes he’d reach a floor where smog-free air was whistling in through plastic over a missing pane of glass.
    He’d been up over the clouds, his physical state matched to his spirit.
    He had believed that his drive and creativity were a part of him.
    He had believed he could take passion and talent and the absorption of good workwith him anywhere. Jessica had met a man with that fire, and something caught between the both of them, oxygenated by the sea air of his visit home and his own self-importance.
    It had all been nothing more than hot stones, fired briefly to keep a body warm between a pile of quilts, then cold and dull by morning.
    “What were we doing just now?” Destiny had asked. Looking at the lake after he had kissed her neck.
    He had shaken his head, looked at the lake, too.
    He didn’t know.
    “This lunch, this counts as taking a girl out. I mean, it’s been a while, but I think it still works this way. And, you asked me after you’d already seen me ugly cry. I told you things. Human things, private things, about myself.”
    She had presented to him two sides.
    Hopelessness and faith.
    The sweat had cooled from his body, leaning against the cold window of Carter Tower, and his heartbeat had gone steady.
    He huffed a fog on the window and traced an outline of the warehouse building, dividing the roof into quadrants, planting sunflowers based on his calculations.
    He watched his drawing fade, thinking how the flowers would catch the sun just right. He heard the ghost of laughter and heated discussions through the din of a hot outdoor bar in Wudaoying.
    He rubbed his chest and felt the traces of how his sobs against his ex-wife’s soft shoulder had pulled and burned.
    Enough.
    He huffed over the glass again. Drew on the glass with his finger. Her profile was easy to find the line of, how her jaw bent back soft and sat over the curve of her neck. He watched her fade, then fogged a long breath