“Oh, sweetheart, come here.” Celeste put an arm around her daughter. “You were a child, it’s not your fault. It was an accident. You can’t blame yourself.”
Jess nodded, but she knew it wasn’t true. She’d never been honest, had never been able to admit what she did, even to herself, certainly not to her mother and father. Closing her eyes, the image of the small boy’s face disappearing into the black hole, ringed in brilliant white, floated into her mind. She opened her eyes. “I want us to be a family again.”
The three-chime tone played again. “Now boarding all rows,” said the airline steward over the public address.
“Baby, it’s okay. We are a family. There’s a reason your father and I never divorced. We just needed space.”
“He’s not coming.” Jess breathed deep and regained control of herself. “You know how he is. When he gets a thing stuck in his head.”
“He’ll come,” Celeste insisted, but then hung her head and nodded. “But maybe you’re right. Why don’t we go and get him, then? You just talked to him. He’s at the hotel, right?”
Jess nodded.
“An hour in a taxi and we’ll be back in Rome. Then we can all go together at 3 p.m. Is that what you want? You decide.”
Wiping her tears away, Jess nodded. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
Celeste stood. “I’ll cancel our reservation.” She pointed at the check-in desk, an attendant standing and talking to passengers. “We have no checked luggage. I can just cancel this flight, and we’ll go meet your father.”
Taking a deep breath, Jess pushed her long blond hair back from her eyes. She felt ridiculous. With the back of one hand she dried her cheeks. “Yes, let’s cancel it.”
Nodding, Celeste strode off purposefully toward the check-in desk. Jess rubbed the tears from her eyes. In what seemed a minute later her mother returned. “Done. Why don’t you give Ben a call, tell him we’re coming?”
The crowd of people around them faced toward the gate, waiting to board, but some of the people had turned. The noise in the concourse hushed, then people started talking loudly, a wave of noise rising up from the lower gates. More people in front of Jess turned around. She had her phone out, was about to dial her father, when she looked up to see what was going on.
People pointed at the television monitors lining the center of the concourse. Standing, Jess turned to see what was going on. In bold letters on the screen behind: “Massive Object on Collision Course for Earth.” A BBC news anchor filled half of the screen above the headline. The people crowded around Jess shushed each other to be quiet.
“We are joined now by the head of the Swiss Astronomical Society,” the anchor said. “Dr. Menzinger, what can you tell us?”
In the other half of the split screen, a diminutive man, balding with wire frame glasses, chewed on his lip. “Exactly what I’ve already said. A massive object, many times the size of our sun, is heading directly into the solar system. The government has been hiding it.”
“The government?” asked the news anchor. “Which government?”
“Any of them,” Dr. Menzinger replied, still mashing his lip. “All of them.”
“This is an incredible claim. Can you back it up?”
Dr. Menzinger laughed. “Go and look yourself. Any amateur can point their telescope into the skies tonight and look at the position of Uranus or Neptune. Are they where they’re supposed to be? The gravity of this object—they’re calling it Nomad—is already pulling the planets away.”
A third box opened on the screen with a blond-haired, tanned man in his mid-thirties. The news anchor introduced him: “This is Professor Hallaway with the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.”
People around Jess had their phones out. They tapped on their screens. Dozens of conversations erupted, breaking the near silence that had descended on the concourse moments before.
“G’day,” said the blond man on the TV screen, nodding.
The news anchor nodded in greeting. “Professor Hallaway, can you confirm what Dr. Menzinger is saying?”
The blond Professor Hallaway took a deep breath before responding: “I can’t confirm what he’s saying, but we are seeing a disturbance in the orbit of Uranus. Something is happening.”
“You see!” Dr. Menzinger shouted on-screen. His video box was grainy, and faded out and then back in. “You don’t need to trust me, go and look for yourselves.”
The anchor turned his attention back to Dr. Menzinger. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the planet Earth has, at most, months before utter destruction.”
Around Jess, shouting started, people yelling into their phones to be heard above the rising background noise.
“Call Ben.”
“What?” Jess pulled her eyes from Dr. Menzinger ranting about black holes and Roche limits tearing the planet to shreds.