Prologue

One morning Finn Spica woke up alone. The family was gone. Absent were the young mother, the twins, grandpa – all gone. Mom did not take the kids and grandpa to the beach house vacation – leaving a day or two before dad’s job allowed him to get away; she did not go to a family funeral, leaving the kids with her mother. None of the typical temporary family divisions explained this sudden, radical transformation.

Mcmansion to mcmansion, Finn’s nearest neighbor four hundred feet away, the length of their frontage, and the little street between them failed to apprehend how different today was from every other day that had gone before it. Finn picked up the newspaper on his front step and briefly made eye contact with the man. The neighbor, eager to get to work on time, realized he’d been seen looking in Finn’s direction, and so he waived a curt hello.