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help.”
    George looked at his shoes. He recalled the uncomfortable meeting he had had with Burim Graziani, born Grazdani, Pia’s father, without telling Pia beforehand, much less asking her permission. By that time Pia had refused to talk about her kidnapping to George or to anyone, and George had been questioned for days by the police. What did he know about the deaths of Pia’s boss, the renowned researcher Dr. Tobias Rothman, and his associate, Dr. Yamamoto? What had happened when Pia was abducted in the street and Will McKinley shot, events he had witnessed? Did he know where Pia had been held, and how she escaped? Had he ever heard of Edmund Mathews and Russell Lefevre, two bankers whose deaths were thought to be linked to Rothman’s? In truth, George knew very little, and when Burim called him, saying he was Pia’s father who had changed his family name after giving Pia up to foster care, and asked to meet, it was a bolt from the clear blue sky. Unfortunately George had thought he could help.
    When they met, despite George’s unfamiliarity with life’s unpleasant underside, he recognized in Burim Grazdani, he couldn’t adjust to Graziani, a very dangerous man. George had left their meeting in a café shaken up, but he had agreed to try to intercede between Burim and Pia. Once again his urge to try to help had got the better of him. When Pia had learned of the meeting she’d become enraged, screaming at George to stay out of her life, saying that this man who said he was her father was dead to her. It was one of the last times George had seen Pia before he left for Los Angeles and she had left for a supposed long sojourn on a beach somewhere, a trip Pia had never talked about to him before coming to L.A. herself.
    “I understand you wanted to get away from New York, and maybe it was best for you,” said George, even though he regretted her leaving terribly. “I understand your sudden career confusion and wanting to put off your internal medicine residency and getting a PhD because of Rothman’s death. I understand all that. But Boulder! Why Boulder . . . ?”
    “I love it here, George. I love the air. I love my work. I love the mountains. I’ve become a health nut. I started running, mountain biking, even skiing.”
    As Pia carried on about Boulder and exactly what she was doing in her current work, George stopped listening. He didn’t care about Boulder; what he really wanted to know was why she had not ended up in L.A., where Pia had said she was going before they had fallen out over her father. The fact that Pia had told him she was going to L.A. to do research for several years was the one and only reason he had turned down the residency at Columbia Medical Center and gone to Los Angeles himself. As he might have predicted, without Pia there, he was not fond of L.A. Pia was still talking.
    “. . . and another reason I came here to Boulder was because of Will McKinley’s osteomyelitis infection in his skull. If you haven’t guessed, I feel overwhelmingly guilty about his condition. Indirectly, I was responsible. My hope is that we can use nanotechnology in the form of a microbivore-based antibacterial treatment on him. We’ve got them here at Nano, and they work. What is needed at this point is FDA approval, which is what we’re going to be working for as soon as we finish preliminary safety studies. Ever since I’ve been here I’ve been working with these microbivores. They are amazing.”
    “Microbivores? You’ll need to fill me in a little.”
    “George, you weren’t listening. Didn’t you hear what I was just telling you about what I’ve been doing here for eighteen months?”
    “My mind wandered a bit,” George admitted. His uncertain smile returned. The hoped-for rapprochement with Pia was testing his less-than-perfect diplomatic skills.
    “I’m not supposed to be talking about what we are doing before all the patents are formalized, but what the hell. I haven’t breathed a