Chapter 8
Eighty-Two Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
From the second he arrives at Clever Girl Fossils on Saturday afternoon, Smithson is everywhere Ripley looks.
Which pretty well ruins the dig.
With the exception of Matteo, who only sometimes pretends to care about paleontology, her entire crew loses their minds when they meet an Oxford professor whose two TED Talks have a million views each.
His casual “Call me James” deepens their hopeless hero worship, as does his polite refusal to join them for their regular Saturday-night shenanigans in Hercules.
The crew’s night out mysteriously gets canceled for the first time ever.
On Sunday morning, his celebrity status is further cemented by the arrival of a town car with multiple boxes of documents, a Wi-Fi hotspot device, and a solar battery.
She has to pull him aside and tell him to get his things delivered to the ranch house or the PO box in town.
He’s apologetic, but it doesn’t feel like a good sign that he’s compromised dig security so quickly.
At lunch, Ripley chews mechanically, not really tasting her club sandwich, while the crew bombards Smithson with adoring questions.
Jordin blushes madly while bringing up specific points from his most recent taxonomy, managing to mention most of her many, many scholarships and awards.
Griff wants advice about transitioning from seasonal digging in Montana, China, and Argentina to year-round opportunities closer to Hercules.
The twins stare silently at Smithson for so long, he eventually starts asking them about themselves, probably to make sure they’re not going to murder him in his sleep.
Finn and Fiona enthusiastically give him twenty minutes of finishing each other’s sentences while showing him phone pics of their attempts to replicate the illustrations in his publications.
Everyone but her calls him James. Even Cara, who’s warmly friendly without crossing the line into fawning.
It stings a little to watch Smithson mentor her crew the way she once desperately hoped he’d mentor her. He’s great at encouraging everyone into a state of joyful, unabashed geeking out over dinosaurs. That shared love was one of her favorite things about grad school.
He reminds her of a lot of things she used to love, actually.
Finding Beauty was better than sex—Sorry, not sorry, Will—but there’s a cramp in Ripley’s heart where the afterglow should be.
If she were still in academia, she’d have years to study Beauty’s every facet and flaw the way she’d memorize freckles on a lover’s skin.
As a private collector, she has no time for long, loving looks, only rushed preps, quick sales, and learning to move on.
Now is a good time to move on, actually. Ripley grabs her plate and untangles her legs from the pushed-together picnic tables they use as a communal dining area. Nobody will notice if she heads down to scout the canyon for an hour or three.
“Ripley.”
She startles, her knife rattling on her plate. No one was beside her ten seconds ago, but sure enough, Smithson’s standing there now.
The man is preposterous. Did he fucking teleport himself around the table to frighten a year off her life? Does he have to enunciate Ripley like he’s the love interest in Aliens? Preposterous.
“Any chance of a look around the dig?”
The table breaks into chaos, and as usual, Jordin comes out on top. “James, you have to see my deinonychus jaw.”
“James, can you check out an extremity? I think I have a forelimb, could be a hindlimb,” Griff says casually, his man crush on full display.
“James, could you show us how deep to pedestal before we plaster?” the twins chorus in eerie unison.
Everyone turns hopefully to Ripley.
There’s no point in putting it off. The sooner he can start shaking the money tree on her behalf, the better. “We’ll tour the dig once the lunch chores are done.”
Two years ago, Ripley and Cara spent a day together hammering wooden steps into the canyon wall. Afterward, they sat on the new staircase drinking godawful light beer and watching the sunset. She remembers loving this place immediately. Feeling so hopeful.
Now, Ripley hesitates at the top step.
A dig is special, almost magical. It’s a hot, dusty, mind-numbing way to spend the summer, brutal on the joints and unpredictable as hell. Yet paleontologists’ souls ache for it through the other three long seasons in the lab.
This is the first site Ripley scouted herself, developed herself, co-manages herself. It’s where she put her life back together after Will. It’s been her precious secret, the thing she didn’t have to share with anyone she didn’t choose.
She never used to mind sharing her work.
When Will’s research wasn’t going well, she gave him her papers to proofread so she could add his name to the list of authors.
Same with sharing money; when his parents cut him off and he was strapped for cash, she paid their rent and he paid the much smaller utility bill.
She started minding when he needed teaching hours to keep his grant funding and asked her to split her summer teaching-assistant hours with him.
Will had started every session late and skipped material so he could finish early.
His “teaching” consisted of reading from her slides.
Yet at the end of the course, his TA ratings were a full point higher than hers.
Rita Shankar—the only other female PhD candidate in paleontology—rolled her eyes when Ripley mentioned it.
“He got marked higher because he’s a man.
Haven’t you read the studies about gender bias in teaching evaluations?
A word of advice: Don’t try to make the students love you, Ripley.
Women are better off being respected.” Tossing her dark curls, Rita breezed off to download more citations.
Ripley made Smithson promise not to take credit for her work. But what if he only has to be physically present for everyone to assume he did the work and give him the accolades?
Beside her, the man in question surveys the narrow, twisty canyon carved into the farmland like a tooth mark in a bone.
Compared to the large-scale operations in Hell Creek, Clever Girl is minuscule.
Unimpressive. A little disorganized. Pathetically few tarps lie scattered across the canyon floor.
Her ragtag crew crowds around him—all except Matteo, her embarrassing nepotism hire.
“Well?” she asks, a little too tightly.
“I’ve never dug anywhere like this.” His eyes glow. “I cannot wait to see what you’ve found.”
The crew rustles and murmurs with pleasure. Ripley glances suspiciously at him, but as far as she can tell, his excitement is genuine.
Against her will, a small flame leaps to life in her heart, the way it does when someone loves the thing you love.
“Let’s start at the north end,” she says.
Jordin scrambles to the head of the pack, beaming and adjusting the bandanna she wears over her dark micro-locs.
Within minutes, the thrill of Smithson’s curiosity and praise has her almost hyperventilating.
Matteo jumps to help replace her tarp afterward, mysteriously useful now that she’s paying more attention to the new guy than to him.
Smithson’s every bit as gracious about Griff’s forelimb, the twins’ pedestal work, Cara’s multiple excavations, and even something Matteo is convinced is a coprolite—fossilized dung.
And then they’re at the south end of the canyon, and Ripley’s chest is tightening.
She crouches down and removes the rocks that secure her tarp. She wants both to please him and to tranquilize the part of herself that craves his praise.
A hush falls as she rolls back the fabric. Beauty’s not a secret, but the pace of private excavation doesn’t leave much time for teaching. Ripley showing her off—that’s new.
Smithson makes a hoarse, shocked sound. He doesn’t so much get down on his knees as fall on them, probably ruining the trousers he’s stubbornly still wearing.
“Professor?” Ripley asks uncertainly.
He reaches for Beauty. Then, as if remembering himself, he glances at Ripley.
The look on his face when she nods reminds her of when, at sixteen, in the back of Tai Collins’s mom’s Hyundai, she told Tai he could take off her shirt.
She thinks Tai’s hands were shaking more than Smithson’s are now, but it’s too close to call.
“Carpometacarpal,” he mutters, caressing the fused wrist and finger bones that look more like a bird’s wing than any hundred-million-year-old fossil has a right to. “Bloody hell.”
Pride and excitement swell hard in her throat. “I think digit one is partially fused, but digit two is free. We’ll find out for sure in the scanner.”
“Bloody hell,” he repeats, stroking up to the shoulder. “Ripley. The coracoid. You have the coracoid.”
“Yeah. I have it.” Ripley cried when she unearthed the supporting link between Beauty’s shoulder and her breastbone.
She’s almost crying now, seeing the James Smithson touching a coracoid that’s not round and mobile like you’d find in a dinosaur that ran, but long and fixed like you’d see in a dinosaur that flapped.
Like a dinosaur that flew.
For one brilliant second, she pictures Beauty in one of Smithson’s taxonomies, wings spread in victory like a phoenix.
Abruptly, Smithson stands. He takes a few pacing steps, his hands interlaced behind his neck in a pose that’s almost agony. “Dear God, Ripley. You did this alone?”
“I had Cara and the crew.”
“But no mentorship. Zero institutional backing or resources. Do you know what this find could mean?” He swoops back down, brushes a speck of earth from the coracoid.
Jordin kneels beside him. “What could it mean, James?”
Smithson’s busy fingers fit themselves into joints and grooves.
“Well,” he murmurs softly, prompting Griff and the twins to crouch down too.
“The critical differences between a theropod and a bird are in the shoulder girdle, wrist, and fingers.” Matteo and Cara lean in, completing a tight circle of khaki-clad butts and sealing Ripley out.
The warmth in her stomach turns to ice.
It was a mistake to bring him here. A mistake not to teach the crew about Beauty herself. Of course they were curious. They knew it was a big deal, and they wanted to be part of it.
Ripley had chosen to be respected, like Rita said, but that set up a situation where all Smithson had to do was say coracoid and her crew fell in love.
She’s…oh God, she’s jealous. It’s mortifying to be twenty-eight and flooded with possessiveness like a kid who doesn’t want to share.
Knowing what’s happening doesn’t make it any easier, though. “I need to take care of something. Cara, can you close up?”
Cara’s light, quick steps follow her retreat. “He’s been talking for barely a minute,” she whispers. Trust Cara to guess exactly what Ripley’s thinking. “The crew is just excited about Beauty. Everyone knows you found her.”
“Do they?” Two days ago, no one questioned who was in charge.
But now, there’s Smithson. James can take time to teach because his family’s well-being doesn’t hinge on getting Beauty out of the ground this summer.
James doesn’t have to make hard choices about whether to be loved or respected at work.
He gets an extra point just for showing up.
“Don’t, Rip,” Cara says urgently, chasing her up the stairs. “Don’t even think about backing out of the agreement.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Come on. You know you’ve got no poker face.” Cara puts on a TV anchor voice. “In other news, Ripley Adams remains unconvinced about this deal. More at six.”
“Well, maybe it’s not a good idea!”
“It is a good idea,” Cara says, uncharacteristically firm. “Have any of your contacts responded to your feelers about funding?”
“Not yet,” she admits.
“Right. So James could mean the difference between a six-figure sale to a museum and an eight-figure sale to someone like Maury. Eight figures, Ripley. Naaáhsa and I could pay off the mortgage and the loan. We could upgrade the Tribal museum and the elders’ center.
I know he didn’t help you when he could have and having him around will take some of the shine off this summer.
I know his investigation will keep you away from the work you’d rather be doing.
I’m asking you to do this anyway. It’s my dig too. ”
Ripley presses a fist to her mouth. She’s breathing hard, fighting tears—a gross overreaction to an impromptu teaching session from the man she once wished would be her teacher.
“Okay. I will tolerate him on the dig and help him with exposing his fraud. But he gets none of Beauty. I’m serious. No publications, no presentations, no press releases. His name will not be in the acknowledgments.”
Cara snort-laughs. “James isn’t like that. He doesn’t want our laurels.”
“Then it shouldn’t be a problem for him not to take them.”
Maybe Smithson isn’t like Will. But there’s no harm in making sure a man can never again steal her work.