Page 51 of That Defining Moment

“Of course he had,” Lysander murmured.

“I looked at that spreadsheet for about thirty seconds.” Colin’s hand drifted to his bump, his fingers spreading over the curve. “And there it was. Tala.” The word came out soft, like it belonged only to him and to his little girl. “It means star in Filipino.”

Diwa reached across and gathered both of Colin’s hands in his own.

“He also had Tesla on the list,” Stephen said. “And Fermi. As in, the paradox about existential loneliness.”

“People get hung up on the loneliness side of things,” Ryland said. He shifted Max to his other arm. “The Fermi Paradox addresses the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extra-terrestrial civilisations and the lack of observable evidence for them. Everyone treats the silence as the sad part.” His voice stayed level, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere above Stephen’s left shoulder. “It really isn’t, though. All that space, all that time, and the expected number of voices answering back is effectively zero. That’s the baseline. That’s what’s normal.” He smiled at Stephen. “So a person just existing is extraordinary. You and I existing, and then making an entire person together — that’s the universe doing the one thing it almost never does.”

The bedroom went quiet. Colin burst into tears, a full, hormonally catastrophic meltdown that shook his entire body. Diwa pulled him in without a word, Colin’s face disappearing into the front of his shirt.

Stephen’s mouth compressed into a line. “I hate it when you say things like that,” he grumbled.

Ryland’s gaze sharpened behind his glasses, recalibrating from astrophysics to opportunity analysis with alarming speed. “So can we name the next one Fermi?”

“No, Ryland.”

“The case is strong.”

Stephen shook his head. “We can do Henry. For Enrico. Or Alan, for Turing. How about that?”

Ryland considered this. His thumb traced the curve of Max’s ear, and after a moment, he nodded. “As long as there’s a next one,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Diwa’s study occupied the entire basement of the Notting Hill townhouse, and it was, without exaggeration, the most extraordinary space Lysander had ever been in.

He’d been spending a lot of time with Diwa. It had crept up on them both, the consequence of orbiting the same bedridden planet. Colin’s room was the centre of the house, and when his father drifted off or needed quiet, the two of them had to go somewhere, and they kept ending up together. Making tea. Walking to Tesco for the particular brand of ginger biscuits Colin had decided he couldn’t live without. Standing in the garden shooting the shit.

They talked easily. Diwa had a dry humour that surfaced when Lysander least expected it and most needed it. And he loved Colin with an attention so total that Lysander’s concerns about his father having an alpha for the first time quieted.

His daddy was loved by a man who repositioned his pillows without being asked and tracked the swelling in his hands.

Colin’s headache had started before breakfast and climbed steadily through the morning until his face had gone the colour of old paper and his sentences were arriving with gaps between the words.

“Both of you, out.” Colin’s eyes were closed, one arm draped across his face to block the light that Diwa had already dimmed to almost nothing. “I love you both dearly, but I need you to leave.”

Diwa didn’t move from the edge of the bed. His hand was on Colin’s stomach, spread wide over the bump the way it always was. “I can stay quiet.”

“You can’t, because you breathe, and breathing is a sound.” Colin’s fingers curled into the duvet. “Diwa. Please take my son downstairs and show him whatever it is you do in that basement all day. Let me sleep until the paracetamol kicks in or I die. I don’t care which, as long as the pain stops.”

Diwa leaned down and pressed his mouth to Colin’s temple. Then he straightened, adjusted the duvet over Colin’s shoulders, and crossed to where Lysander was hovering in the doorway.

“He gets like this,” Diwa said, once they were on the landing with the door pulled shut behind them. His jaw had tightened. “The headaches come and go. Sometimes they pass in an hour. Sometimes he’s out for the rest of the day.”

“Is the doctor —”

“The doctor knows. They’re monitoring it.” Diwa’s hand found the banister, and he stood there for a moment, looking at the closed door. Then he exhaled, pushed off the railing, and turned for the stairs. “Come on. I’ll show you where I hide when your father’s being difficult.”

The basement stairs were narrow, the thick carpeting swallowing the sound of their footsteps. Diwa hit a switch at the bottom, and the room came alive.

An arcade cabinet stood pride of place against the far wall, its screen glowing blue-white in the dimness. “Is that Street Fighter?”

“Street Fighter II Turbo. Original cabinet.” Diwa crossed to it and tapped the side of it with two fingers. “Ryland found it at an auction. He and I restored the board ourselves over a weekend. Replaced the CRT, rewired the coin mechanism.” He paused. “Then we played it for nine hours and Ryland beat me two hundred and fourteen times out of two hundred and twenty, and I haven’t touched it since.”

Beyond the arcade cabinet, the basement opened up into a space that bore very little resemblance to a study. It looked more like a mission control centre. Three monitors sat on a wide desk in a curved arrangement, their stands adjusted to different heights, flanked by a mechanical keyboard and a mouse that looked like it had been designed for someone piloting a spacecraft. Cable management ran beneath the desk in neat channels, and a small forest of hard drives sat on a shelf to the right, their indicator lights blinking in staggered rhythms.

A recording setup filled the entire back wall. Two studio microphones hung from adjustable boom arms, positioned on either side of a desk that was separate from the main workstation. Acoustic panels lined the wall behind them in a pattern of charcoal and slate grey. The camera, a proper broadcast-grade unit, not a webcam, sat on a tripod between the microphones, its lens angled at a chair upholstered in dark leather.