The Infinite Tides Read Online Free PDF

and new as if the whole of the scene had been here forever and had never changed. No history. No passage of days. Indeed time itself an abstraction the meaning of which had dissolved so that each moment slipped into the next without distinction, change, or possibility.
    .  .  .
    When he arrived home he sat for a long moment behind the wheel looking up at the flat front of the empty house. It was difficult now to understand why any of them had ended up here, in this neighborhood that was a plane ride away from his office in Houston, but then he knew that part of the reason, or perhaps all of it, had been his own belief that Quinn’s life would be much the same as his, that she would excel in the same way that he had. Was that not an equation the solution of which had function and meaning and importance? Was that not what every father would want for his daughter?
    At last he turned off the motor and opened the door and as he did so the garage across the street began to hum open. To his left stood the closed square door of his own garage, a space he still had not entered even though the central reason he had returned to the cul-de-sac was to remove his own belongings from the house. He knew such items were in the garage, boxed and waiting for him, and that he should be loading them into a U-Haul and driving back to Houston to find someplace to rent or buy but he had not done so, instead remaining to paint the house and watch over its sale, although he knew these efforts were not necessary. He knew he should just walk away from the whole thing and leave the empty container behind. That was what Barb had done, after all. And yet he remained, a proposition baffling even to himself, the idea of opening the garage and sorting out its contents something he simply did not yet want to address.
    A red sportscar had emerged from the dark interior of the open garage across the street and as Keith turned toward his own house the driver’s voice came: “Hey there, neighbor.”
    He turned back toward the street. The temperature had risen five or ten degrees since he had left the hardware store and the air was thick with heat. “Hey there,” he called in return.
    She might have been in her mid-forties, oversized black sunglasses and a broad friendly smile framed in the open window of the sports-car, brown hair pulled back from her face. He expected the car to drive away but then she called out to him again: “I don’t think we’vemet,” she said. “Jennifer. I live, well, I live right there.” She motioned to the house.
    “Good to meet you,” he said in return. She did not drive away and he stood awkwardly, waiting, and then set the laptop bag on the hood of the rental car and stepped forward into the street. When he arrived at her car she extended a hand out the window and he took it.
    “I’m Keith Corcoran,” he said.
    She smiled and removed her sunglasses and hooked them into the front of her top. Keith found his gaze following them into her cleavage and when he snapped his eyes back to her face she smiled more broadly as if to acknowledge that she had noticed this wayward glance. “You’re all moved in?” she said.
    “Not really,” he said. “Mostly getting it set up to sell.” He paused, wondering briefly how much she might already know and what to say next. Then he said, “You probably met my wife, Barb. She was living here before.”
    She stopped smiling for a moment, staring at him, and the silence that ensued was long enough that he began to wonder what he had said to bring the brief conversation to a stop.
    “I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?” he said.
    “Oh, no, not at all.” She sounded surprised and looked out the windshield briefly, as if charting her route out of the cul-de-sac. Then she turned to him again. “I thought you both moved out.”
    He paused before answering. “More or less,” he said, looking for more words but finding none. What was he supposed to say? “She moved out,