“Then when you arrive in Go Back Cove,” Grace said, pulling out a chair at the table and urging him to sit down, “I suggest you continue using ‘Luke Pascal.’ ”

“But . . .”

She patted his shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Luke,” she assured him, going to the oven and getting the plate of eggs and toast she’d kept warming for him. “As soon as you’re done with breakfast, you can sort through your belongings and give me what clothes need to be washed. Then we’ll get on the Internet and find you a hotel in Go Back Cove. It’s a small town, so it shouldn’t take you too long to find Camry.”

“My car was recovered?”

Grace set the plate down in front of him. “Jack and his deputy brought it back just this morning.

It’s parked in the upper driveway behind the kitchen.”

“Really, Dr. Sutter, I don’t think I’m the one to go after your daughter.”

“Of course you are, Luke. Because if I know Camry, the moment you work up the nerve to tell her that Podly is scattered over half of Springy Mountain, she’ll drag you back here so fast your head will be spinning.”

Luke snapped his navy blue eyes to hers, his face draining of color. “Y-you know about Podly?” he whispered, glancing at Grey before looking back at her. “You know it was your satellite that crashed here last summer?”

Grace went to the fridge to get him some juice, giving her equally stunned husband a smug smile as she walked by. “Do you honestly believe I wouldn’t know someone was eavesdropping on Podly’s transmissions?” she asked, bringing the juice back to Luke. “All the time you and Camry were burning up the Internet with your e-mails, I was watching you watching Podly.”

“Did Camry know?” he asked, absently taking the juice she handed him.

“I never told her. But if she’d bothered to check, she’s certainly smart enough to have found out. But then, I doubt she would have been looking for an eavesdropper.”

“But you were?”

Grace shrugged. “An old habit from my days working for StarShip Spaceline.”

He looked down at his plate. “Then you also know that I caused the satellite to malfunction.” He looked up at her, his eyes filled with sincere remorse. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know what I did to make it crash. I spent three months going over the data in my own lab, and the last two months scouring the mountain, hoping I could find enough salvageable parts to figure out what went wrong.” He turned in his seat to face her fully and took her hand in both of his. “You have my word, Dr. Sutter, I was going to bring whatever I found directly to you. I-I’m sorry,” he repeated.

Grace patted his shoulder. “I believe you, Luke.” She nudged him around to his plate of rapidly cooling food. “Now eat, so we can get you packed up and headed to Go Back Cove. The sooner you find Camry, the sooner you can talk her into helping you find our satellite. Podly had heat shields in case something like this happened, so there’s a good chance the data bank survived reentry. Camry knows these mountains quite well, and between your trajectory data and her love of a good challenge, I’m sure you’ll both be locked in my lab with Podly by the winter solstice. Eat,” she repeated, pointing at his food when he tried to say something else.

He snapped his mouth shut with a frown and picked up his fork.

Grace took hold of her also frowning husband and led him up the back stairway.

“That’s it?” Grey asked as soon as they reached the upstairs hall. “The man destroys your life’s work, and ye not only hand it over to him, you practically hand him our daughter as well?”

“Luke didn’t destroy anything,” she said, pulling him into their bedroom and closing the door.

“He just told ye he crashed Podly.”

“No, he told me he thinks he caused Podly to crash.” She stepped into his arms and started toying with one of the buttons on his shirt. “And I merely let him believe that he did,” she said softly.

Grey’s hands went to her shoulders. “Did you crash the satellite?”

“I was rather busy right about then, Grey. If you remember correctly, our baby girl was giving birth to our granddaughter at that precise moment.”

“Then if you didn’t make it crash, and Pascal didn’t, who did?”

“I have no idea.” She started toying with his buttons again, undoing the top one. “Maybe the same person who sent us that Christmas card? Because what are the chances that my satellite would crash so close to my home?” She looked up. “The odds of that happening are astronomical, Grey. It has to be the magic.”

He reached up and stilled her hand just as she undid the next button. “I find myself growing worried about ye, wife.”

“How’s that?” she asked, still managing to undo the next button.

“You’ve been acting far too much like me lately.”

Grace went perfectly still. Oh God, he was right! She’d turned into a warrior, only instead of wielding a sword, her weapon was deceit.

She headed for the door. “I’m going to go tell Luke everything.”

“Oh, no you’re not,” he said, sweeping her up in his arms with a laugh and striding to their bed. “If ye confess to Pascal, then I’ll be forced to go get Camry, and I agree it would turn out badly for all of us.”

He opened his arms and dropped her on their bed, then quickly settled on top of her. “I’m not upset ye guilted Pascal into going after Camry, only that I hadn’t thought of it myself.” He started undoing the buttons on her blouse. “But then, I didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, did I? So when were ye going to tell me your little satellite is scattered over half of Springy Mountain? I would have found it for ye, Grace.”

“I know you would have, and I love you for that. But Podly really isn’t mine anymore, Grey. It’s Camry’s future. And I need for her to want to go find it herself.”

“And is the secret to ion propulsion sitting under three feet of snow right now?”

“Yes.”

He stopped undressing her. “Ye solved the puzzle? Then we have to go get it!”

He started to get up, but Grace pulled him back. “No, we don’t. Podly’s been holding the secret for twenty years; I think it can wait another couple of weeks.”

“Twenty years! Ye solved the problem twenty years ago, and you’ve been letting it orbit the Earth all this time? Grace, that’s been your life’s work!”

“Don’t get so excited,” she soothed, cupping his cheeks and setting her thumbs over his lips. “I didn’t find the answer, Camry did—when she was twelve.”

He tried to sit up, but she held him over her. “One day when Camry was twelve, she was down in the lab with me, working on a project for her school science fair. But then she started looking over my shoulder and asking me one question after another about what I was doing. And when I told her the particular problem I was having, she merely pointed at the screen and asked why I simply didn’t transpose two seemingly disconnected integers in the equation I was working on.”

She gently patted his cheeks when he frowned, and gave a soft laugh. “Don’t ask me to explain it right now, or we’ll still be in this bed come spring. Anyway, it might have been a question from an unschooled child, but it was pure genius. I reversed the numbers, which forced me to change several more, and within an hour I knew I could make ion propulsion work.”

“And why didn’t ye shout it to the world?”

“Because unlocking the code actually created a whole new set of problems. I couldn’t really claim I had mastered ion propulsion, because I hadn’t figured out how to actually control it.” She sighed. “Ions can be used for more than just propulsion, Grey; they can also be used as a weapon. I wasn’t ready to go there, because I wasn’t sure the world was ready to go there.”

“And now?” he asked. “If Camry and Pascal find Podly like ye hope, and they discover the secret, is the world ready now?”