This is Teri J. Babcock’s second story in these pages, and I knew this original story was going to be a Pulphouse story when I got to the line “My socks had babies.” And it goes from there.

Teri says by way of her bio, “She lives, writes, and is rained on in Vancouver, British Columbia.”

Yup, I lived in the Pacific Northwest for over thirty years. I know what that feels like.

Reese crouched behind his wife’s antique dresser, digging his toes into the plush beige carpet for better purchase. There was movement in the shadows of the closet, then a set of sock toes appeared, tentatively, like the nose of a forest deer scenting the forest breeze.

Reese stiffened, holding his breath so that his exhalation would not alarm his prey. The toes reached upward, questing, slight ripples passing through the weave. Then, slowly, like an oversized woolen caterpillar, the sock inched itself into the bedroom.

Reese kept perfectly still while the sock made its way a foot across the carpet. Then, looking even more cautious than the first, the sock’s mate emerged. It rippled slowly along, pausing for long periods while it gathered its energy for the next burst of movement.

The first sock had nearly made it to the underside of the bed when Reese pounced, grabbing it with both hands while it writhed around his palms in an attempt to give him rope-burn. The second sock lay motionless in a crumpled heap, playing dead.

With a quick, practiced movement Reese thrust his foot through its mouth, and the sock stopped moving. But now the other sock had gathered itself into a ball and was rolling unevenly yet inexorably towards the shadows of the closet. Reese fell on it, gripping the end and shaking madly while the sock tried to re-roll itself. At last he was able to unroll it long enough to get his foot in it, but it continued to ripple on his foot as if it were distressed.

The sensation was not unpleasant; it felt like a light massage. Yet a creeping feeling of guilt keep him from enjoying it—was this the sock version of sobbing? Experimentally, he touched one socked foot to the other and held them there.

The ripples ceased. Reese sat there on the bed with his feet together as if he was performing some new and awkward experiment with meditation or yoga, when he noticed more movement at the edge of the closet. As he watched, a handful of tiny knit socks edged their way into the light.

“Samantha!” His wife was in the bathroom where she had hung her nylons the night before, getting dressed. She used a knot learned from a marine manual to keep them secured to the shower rail overnight.

His wife’s voice was muffled by the closed door. “Are you almost ready?”

“My socks had babies.”

“That’s great.” There was a muffled thump from the bathroom and then the clatter of something hard falling in the bathtub. “There’s an empty yogurt container on the drying rack, put them in that.”

He scooped up the baby socks. They squirmed softly against his fingers. He put the yogurt container in the dresser in his mostly empty sock drawer and folded T-shirts around it so it wouldn’t jostle when he closed the drawer.

“Hey, honey, it looks like there’s a couple of merino in there, maybe an angora.”

One had been especially fuzzy and soft, a pale yellow.

“Just the one?”

“Yeah. There’s only five.”

“Hmm. Maybe you should check the bedroom, see if there’s one more that got separated from the rest of the litter. But tonight, okay? We’ve got to leave, I’m going to be late.”

His wife came out of the bathroom. There was a thin trickle of blood running down her leg, but otherwise she looked presentable for her job as a junior attorney. Black suit, skirt, and heels with a crisp white shirt.

“Your nylons got you again. Are you sure you shouldn’t switch to pants?” Even as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. Samantha was decidedly not open to his sartorial advice.

She shot him a dark look. “These nylons were expensive. When I bought them at Waldorf’s, they said I’d never need another pair.” So long as she followed the care instructions and washed them every night, which she did. “I’m damn well going to wear these nylons until I don’t need to wear nylons anymore.” She blotted her leg with a wet washcloth. “Let’s go.”

Sam dropped him at the subway station, then beetled off in their Honda to her first client meeting of the day.

The downtown train was half empty, so Reese sat, on a narrow blue pleatherette seat designed for a ten-year-old girl, checking out the other commuters. The guy sitting across from him had a brush cut—the kind of too-short haircut you give yourself with clippers, when you have decided you no longer have enough hair to need to pay a stylist—and wore trousers with sandals and no socks, defiantly flaunting societal expectations.

Reese both hated and admired him. The man crossed his legs casually and opened his newspaper, not caring what anyone else thought of his feet. As Reese watched, a tiny sock poked itself out through the cuff of his pants. It was the exact color of his own unmatched baby sock.

“Excuse me,” Reese said, horrified to find himself addressing a stranger and yet compelled to—what if it was actually his sock?—“But I think that might be my sock, there, poking out of your pant leg.” He started to explain about the new litter, but the man deftly snatched it out of his cuff and offered it to Reese.

“It happens,” he said with a smile.

“Thank you,” said Reese. He fumbled with it, trying to think of a safe place to put it, then decided on the zippered pocket of his jacket.

The sandaled man had resumed reading.

“It’s our first litter,” Reese said. “I’m still learning.”

The sandaled man nodded encouragingly and returned to his paper.

“Anyway, thanks again,” Reese said, lamely.

The man lowered his paper and gave Reese a once-over. He must have decided he liked what he saw, because he pulled out a card.

J.J. Prudhoe, Sock Breeder.

“You have any trouble, call me,” he said.

Reese squinted at it. “Oh, gee. Appreciate it.”

“Pleasure,” said J.J. Prudhoe. “My stop.” And then he disappeared into the maw of people exiting the train doors.

When Reese got to work he put the baby sock on two fingers and showed it to all the office ladies, who made the obligatory cooing noises and exclamations of delight. Their departments had all just submitted budgets last week and hadn’t had anything approved yet, so rather than start any new projects Reese organized his shelves and restocked his supply of pens and writing pads.

It was dark when his wife picked him up at their station.

“How was work,” Reese said.

“Sucked.” Samantha smiled. Her leg was bleeding again.

“Sorry, hon.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a client meeting after dinner, too.”

Reese meant to tell her about the sock on the train, but he forgot about it until after dinner, when she’d left. He got the sock out of his zippered pocket—it was rolled up in a ball, not moving—and took it to the bedroom to put it in the yogurt container. To his relief it nestled right up to the others. After a moment’s thought he took off his own socks and put them in too. As he was putting on his slippers he saw a small, pale-yellow sock tucked against the dresser leg. Frowning, he opened the drawer…and saw two pale yellow angora socks still there.

Shit.

He dropped the new sock in with the rest and shut the drawer.

He had Prudhoe’s card; he could call to return the lost sock. Belatedly he realized he didn’t know which of the three it was. Maybe he could keep them all. Maybe J.J. Prudhoe wouldn’t even notice a missing sock. If he was a breeder he might have dozens of litters, too many too keep track of.

Reese lay awake, considering his options, until after midnight. His wife was snoring softly, a sure sign that her allergies had returned. Moonlight cast a silver square on the carpet of their bedroom.

As he lay staring at it, a shape like a bulky, irregular sausage humped into view. Impossible to tell the color. Another, smaller shape worked its way towards it and they met on the carpet. The shapes joined into one lump, impossible to discern. There was a soft sound of moving wool, but nothing more. Reese lay listening, perplexed, until a lightning impulse jolted him to spring for the light.

There on the floor was a large, thick, dark-golden winter sock, and one from the pair he’d worn today. They were frozen in the sudden brightness, twined around each other.

He sprang for them. The winter sock tried to extricate itself but it was too fluffy to move quickly, and the other just lay limply. There was yellow lint stuck all over his gray one. He dropped it and wiped his hands on his pajamas.

“What are you doing,” his wife said, in the raspy tones of spouses everywhere who have been wakened unkindly.

“Socks,” he said, temporarily at a loss for words.

“That’s my brother’s sock,” she said, squinting. “He forgot it here at Christmas. What’s it doing in our bedroom?”

“Fucking my sock,” he said indignantly.

“Well, leave them alone. I need to sleep. Turn off the light.” And she rolled over and put her pillow over her head.

He lay in the dark listening, imagining every whisper of sound to be moving wool.

In the morning, he called J.J. Prudhoe.

“All socks are hermaphroditic,” J.J. said. “And non-monogamous. At least in my experience. Some will tell you that men’s work socks pitch rather than catch, but I’m here to tell you, it’s just not so. Breeding pairs don’t seem especially sensitive to whether the litter is their own or not. You can easily introduce socks from other litters, if you lose one of the breeding pair in the dryer or some such.”

That reminded Reese. “That sock you gave me, it wasn’t mine. When I got home I saw I had two already.”

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Reese. He’ll be perfectly happy with your litter, and I don’t need him back.”

“Thank you. I felt really bad, like I’d stolen it. And you were so decent on the train. Are you sure I can’t take you for coffee or…a beer?”

Prudhoe was silent for a bit. Then he said, “Listen, Reese. Why don’t you come by my place. Bring some root beer, and I’ll show you around.”

“Yeah, I’d really like that.”

That Saturday Reese brought a case of root beer, and a case of real beer, and drove out to J.J. Prudhoe’s place in Abbotsford. Prudhoe had a townhouse with a tiny yard hardly big enough to swing a cat in.

“Price of land these days,” Prudhoe said, shaking his head. He gestured grandly at the Nine Oaks Mini-Mall across the highway. “All this used to be Big Sky Country. Cattle far as the eye could see. Lucky socks don’t need too much room. Anyhow, welcome to Rancho Calcetino,” he said, leading Reese through the side gate.

“Socks,” he said to Reese’s puzzled look. “Calcetino is Spanish for socks. More or less.”

Reese paused to look at a scraggly ball of wet wool, badly pilled and covered in burrs, off the side of the cement path. Prudhoe saw him looking.

“All domesticated creatures want their freedom, just as wild ones do,” Prudhoe said. “But they don’t have the instincts, the knowledge, to survive in nature. Ones who escape, they don’t get far. I give ’em a good wash, run ’em through the dryer. Reminds them where they belong.”

“What if they don’t come back?”

“You mean, somehow survive in the wild? More power to them. My neighbor two doors down fancies himself an outdoorsman. He let a technical climbing sock get away from him. Peruvian vicuna wool and breathable polypropylene bonded to a graphene shell. Fabulously expensive. I’ve caught glimpses of it, out there on the greenbelt. I think it wants to make for the mountains, but can’t get across the highway.”

“Are you going to catch it?”

Prudhoe’s look was distant. “You don’t try to catch a sock like that, Reese. It’s meant to be wild. I want to breed it. I’ve let some of my best socks out there. Cashmere. Angora. Qiviut. Hoping the right combination of pheromones will draw it in. It’s got to have the urge eventually. But nothing yet.”

They both stared into the horizon together, imagining.

When Reese got home his wife was painting antibiotics on her leg.

“What happened?”

“The scratch from yesterday got infected.” Sam’s nylons were soaking in a bowl, the water faintly pink. “Did you move the baby socks? When I went to check on them they weren’t in the dresser anymore.”

“No. I’ll have a look for them.”

He got a flashlight and looked under their bed, then went to their second bedroom. They hadn’t used it for anyone staying over since Christmas, and it had become a landing pad for all the stuff they hadn’t gotten around to taking care of yet. He peered around the towering stacks of books and piles of winter clothes, boxes of kitchen gadgets, and sports equipment. He left the main light off, knelt and played the flashlight under the bed, which was full of shoe boxes and a suitcase. He shone the light in each corner, then went back to one corner for a closer look, thinking he saw movement.

There was the smallest bit of yellow sock just visible past the edge of a shoebox. He squeezed under the bed, shimmying under to get a better look. When he got close enough, he knocked the shoe box to the side. His gray socks were nestled up against a discarded pair of gray fleece workout shorts that he had not seen for several months. The baby socks were lumped up beneath them.

He wiggled back out, then stepped across the bed to the other side, but couldn’t get underneath because of all the stuff piled up between the bed and the wall. He managed to get enough boxes moved to reach his socks and their litter—which had already grown in size from baby socks to a child’s size.

He put the sock family and their plastic yogurt tub back in the dresser. He went back and kept looking for the big yellow sock, but there was no sign of it.

The next day when he put his socks on, one felt thicker than the other, and his shoe was too tight. He wasn’t sure if it was okay to wear a sock that was…gestating, so he took it off and found a regular sports sock instead.

Samantha was in the bathroom, but this morning it was quiet. When she emerged, she was wreathed in smiles, wearing her nylons triumphantly.

“I kept them in a box with mothballs last night.”

“Yeah?”

“They were too stoned to do anything this morning. I read about it on the Internet. I’ll smell of mothballs every time I wear them, but it’s a small price to pay.”

“That’s great, honey. I found the babies.”

“Did you? Were where they?”

“In the second bedroom. You know, if I cleaned that up a bit I could use it as a—well, I could fit a couple of breeding cages in there.” He crossed his fingers and watched her face. Cleaning up would mean removing some of her stuff as well as his own.

His wife made a squinchy face. “I thought we were going to use it as a workout room.”

“Oh, yeah. We still could. They aren’t big cages.”

His wife took in this information without changing her expression. “How does your breeder guy sell these socks of his?”

“Oh. Uh, secondary market. Facebook, Craigslist. His are specialty, alpaca and cashmere, even quivit.”

His wife looked at him blankly.

“Quivit is musk-oxen hair. But the pair he got didn’t like each other so he didn’t get any babies.”

“Sounds hard.”

“Well, yeah. It can be. I just thought it would be fun to try. The cages aren’t expensive. J.J. can sell me a couple used ones for twenty bucks each.”

Sam wore her considering face. Space in a room they didn’t use anyway, and forty dollars for two cages that would probably be useful if they ever decided to get a real pet.

“What do they eat?”

Funny enough, but he and J.J. hadn’t talked about feed. And Reese had just assumed that he wouldn’t have to worry about it.

“Huh. Well, I don’t know. I mean, our litter is growing fine, and we don’t feed them.”

“Yes, but they’re not locked in a cage. They can forage. We have no idea what they might be eating.”

“Well…maybe they don’t need to eat. Maybe they just grow.”

“Conservation of mass and energy, husband mine.” Sam tapped his forehead. “You don’t get something from nothing.”

Reese didn’t want to admit it, but he knew his wife was right.

He set up the cage with a folded towel in the bottom. J.J. told him he didn’t need a water bottle for them, but they had one in their junk drawer from his wife’s niece’s hamster, and the whole arrangement looked better to him with the bottle hanging on the side.

Sam squinted at it. “What are you going to feed them?”

“Yeah…” Reese tapped his chin with his fingers. J.J. had been vague when Reese had asked him what they ate.

“You’re on a journey, Reese,” J.J. had said. “One man cannot tell another man his path.”

“But I just want to know what to feed them,” Reese said.

J.J. had clapped him firmly on the shoulder. “I’m so proud of you,” he said. “So proud.”

“You have no idea,” his wife said.

“Well…no.”

A week later and the experiment was already failing. His wife was crouched, peering at his socks. No longer fluffy, they had gone thin and listless.

“You’re starving them,” she said. “Open the door. Let them go out.”

Reese made a face.

“They’ll still be in the apartment,” she said. “If they disappear, we’ll find them.”

Reese opened the cage door, and shut the bedroom light off.

A week after he had released the socks, Reese, unable to sleep, was wandering in their dark, unlit apartment, contemplating the city lights through the living room window.

The socks had been gone since the morning after he opened the cage, and had not reappeared. As he passed the second bedroom, trailing his hand along the wall, he stopped in the open doorway and listened.

Was that a faint sound? He stepped into the room and held his breath.

Faint, whispery sounds. His socks were home, back in their cage. He stood motionless, emotion welling in him that they had liked his cage well enough to return.

His hand hovered over the light switch. Should he? He wanted to see them. And perhaps, they were eating.

He flicked the switch.

At first there seemed to be too many of them. The parents and the whole litter were there, but there seemed to be more…was that why they had left? Had they had another litter already?

He leaned in, counting. They were pressed together like a litter of nursing piglets. Were they in fact nursing? Was that the mama there, in the middle?

But the middle sock was the wrong color, not gray, but a light blue.

Samantha’s bed-sock. Thick and warm, she had worn them at night, until she’d lost one in the laundry—months ago now. This must be its mate. Was it nursing the other pair’s litter? Had they adopted the single sock into their family? And now—he felt this with a sudden, clear certainty, the proof right before his eyes—they were bonding.

He felt a sudden rush of warmth and pride in the forward-thinking-ness of his breeding pair. He folded his arms and watched, feeling privileged and grateful to witness this intimacy and tenderness.

The pale blue-gray sock rippled a little and he bent forward for a closer look.

Then closer still, because he couldn’t quite see.

And then, when he could see, when he couldn’t not see, he shrieked like a little girl.

“They were eating it. Your pale-blue bed sock. Like it was…like it was prey.”

His wife was not as upset about that as he thought she should be.

“Oh, that makes total sense,” Samantha said as she leaned towards the cage for a better view. “The fiber is already processed. They can’t have much of a digestive system.”

“They’re cannibals,” Reese said, his voice hoarse with outrage.

“I think they ate your gym shorts too,” she said, holding up the gray ones that had been under the bed, now thinned with holes. “If that makes you feel any better.”

“It does not.”

“Does this mean you’re giving up on breeding them?”

“Yes! No. I don’t know. I have mixed feelings about being party to this…this travesty.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t judge,” his wife said carefully. “That’s just their way. And everybody needs socks.”

Unless you decided not to wear them at all. Which reminded Reese of J.J. Prudhoe.

“I can’t tell you where I get the raw fiber, Reese,” J.J. had told him over the phone, sounding insufferably smug. He had hung up without giving Reese any information at all.

And so that Friday Reese had stalked J.J., waited in his green Honda in the strip-mall parking lot until he saw Prudhoe’s custom baby-blue Ford F-150 turn on to the highway. He followed Prudhoe on a trip to three Abbotsford thrift shops, watched J.J. from the road through binoculars as he poked through the mateless sock bin, unerringly picking out the wool from the cotton-polyester, caring little what condition they were in.

“I’m always happy to see you, I know you’re gonna buy our holey ones,” Reese imagined the lipsticked lady at the cash desk saying. J.J. chuckled and said something Reese couldn’t lip read, then left the store. Reese waited until J.J. had driven away, then darted in.

“Say, what’s that fellow who buys the holey socks use them for,” he said, leaning casually on the glass countertop.

She pursed her too-pink lips. “Don’t lean there, unless you want to donate your arm,” she said, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Not that its any of your business, but that gentleman makes dog beds for the SPCA. Natural fibers are very comforting to displaced animals.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling, no doubt imagining her worn-out socks being transformed into a force for good.

“Oh, is that right.”

Crafty, crafty Prudhoe. His cover story would ensure everyone would be eager to help and he would pay hardly anything for his fiber. “I’ve heard tell of sock breeders, buying used socks on the cheap to feed their litters.” He folded his arms casually and nodded to himself.

Lipstick Lady stared at him as if he was insane.

“You got a twisted mind, mister,” she said.

But that didn’t stop her from taking his money for two fraying cashmere sweaters. One was pink and one was blue, and the right sleeve on both was longer than the left.

“My wife will love these,” he said, dangling the sad, stretched-out sweaters across his torso as if they were haute couture. But the pinched look on the cashier’s face said he was laying it on a bit thick so he didn’t say anything else.

Reese put the pink sweater in the cage and locked the door. The socks were nested in the corner, the gray adults curled around the babies like a sort of breakfast pastry. The husk of his wife’s pale-blue bed sock lay on the bottom of the cage like a discarded skin.

“Will it work?” His wife sounded dubious.

“If they eat gym shorts they ought to eat this.” He tapped the wire. “Cashmere, guys. Good stuff. Yum yum.”

By Saturday afternoon he was ready to call the experiment a success. The long arm of the sweater looked worried and tattered, and thin bands of pink were starting to appear in the babies. It opened up possibilities, patterns by feeding control. He was just starting to imagine what he could do with that when he noticed that one of the gray adults had taken the center-spot in the nest. He lifted it out with two fingers, then dropped it in despair. Holes were already appearing in the sock’s neck.

The sock made no attempt to free itself as the babies moved in to finish it off.

Depressed, that night Reese watched the Nature channel and drank scotch until he fell asleep on the couch.

In the morning he woke, sober and clear-eyed, the pieces falling into place.

“I’ve been thinking about this all wrong,” he told Sam over coffee. “What if socks are hive mind. A hive-mind is really one organism, with many moving parts. If the parts are separated, they develop their own individual identities, but once they’re together again, their consciousness is re-joined. If you look at it that way, the socks aren’t practicing cannibalism. It’s more like a body consuming its own cells to grow new ones. Do you know where my tablet is? I want to put that on Facebook.”

His wife looked at him measuringly over her coffee cup.

“You seem over-excited. Would you like a little herbal tea?” she said.

“Actually, no.”

“Have a bit. For me. It’s chamomile.” She pushed a mug towards him.

“I don’t like chamomile. It doesn’t really have flavor, yet somehow manages to taste gross.” But he drank it for her anyway.

She watched him with an intensity that was a bit unsettling, as if she was thinking about having sex. That would be okay. If he could stay awake. He felt himself relaxing, drifting.

He woke with a start, his wrists bound behind his back, tied to one of their kitchen chairs.

His wife was sitting on the table, wearing a patient look and bare legs.

“We need to talk. About the sock situation.”

He gaped at her.

“Certain parties feel you know too much, Reese,” she said.

“Prudhoe…”

“Prudhoe knows how to keep his mouth shut. You don’t.”

“Are you really my wife? Has our marriage been some cover for your…secret spy life?”

Her face softened. “Oh, Reese. No. I didn’t know anything about this sock stuff before. But when you started stalking Prudhoe, his wife called me. And then, one of the founding partners of my firm.”

His head spun. “Your firm? Was I set up to meet Prudhoe?”

She sighed. “Well, apparently J.J. is always trolling public transit with baby socks hanging out of his pockets or whatever, looking for acolytes. So it’s not that much of a coincidence. And a huge national firm like mine has tens of thousands of clients in every kind of industry, so it’s hardly surprising that they have a client that does socks.”

She paused. “I’m sorry I drugged you, sweetheart. I needed to make sure you weren’t going to say or do something we couldn’t take back. Do you want some water?” She held up a sippy cup.

He glared at her and shook his head.

“Suit yourself. First of all, Prudhoe isn’t the brains of that operation. It’s his wife. Second, despite J.J.’s artisanal pretensions, they make nearly all their money from one-hundred-percent cotton sports socks at a production facility in Langley, using waste fiber from rag paper production and a local T-shirt manufacturer. The fiber is pre-digested and fed to the clones in a growth solution—”

“Clones!” Reese felt as if the floor was giving way beneath him, dropping him into some heretofore-unimagined level of hell. A vision sprang to his mind’s eye of rows of white baby socks, suspended in tanks of viscous liquid, drifting helplessly like kelp.

His wife gave him a waspish look. “How else do you think get they can make them all exactly the same size and shape? That doesn’t happen in nature, Reese.”

“But it’s…unnatural.” In his vision the screams of the infant socks went unheard, muffled by the gurgling tank.

“They haven’t been able to transfer the technology from cotton to wools, for some reason. Animal fiber socks are still reproduced the old way.”

Relief flooded him.

“But they’re working on it. Reese, my firm has two very large sock farms as clients and they want this kept quiet. If you weren’t my husband, they’d have already taken measures. I said I’d speak to you.”

“Measures!”

“They can make you forget,” his wife said, with a tone halfway between sinister and mysterious.

“What do they want me to forget?” he said.

“Everything. Cannibalism, hive-minds, hermaphrodity, polyamory, blended families. If that gets out, they’ll never sell another sock south of the Mason-Dixon line again. People will walk around wearing Uggs and fluffy bedroom slippers.” She shuddered.

Reese nodded, deflated. The great Sock Mafia would crush the truth beneath their capitalist agenda, and he would have no choice but to be party to it.

“Please tell me they’re giving you a bonus for your cooperation.”

His wife looked a little embarrassed. “They…yes. I negotiated a settlement for you to sign an NDA.”

“Okay. Good.” He could take their money. Money would ease the sting a little.

But something didn’t add up.

“Why didn’t any of our sports socks start breeding? You think they would have been triggered, with all the pheromones around from our mating pairs.”

His wife was silent, watching him.

The pieces clicked together in his mind, and for a moment he was frozen by the evil brilliance of their strategy. “They’ve genetically modified those clones so they can’t breed.” He shook his head in disgust. “They can corner the market, screw the little guy. When they’re done, you won’t even be able to raise your own socks. You’ll have to buy every single pair.”

It was just so, so wrong.

His wife laced her fingers. “Would you like to hear the number I got for your NDA?”

A vast expanse of turquoise ocean shimmered beyond the pale pink beach sand, the view broken only by the occasional striped fuchsia umbrella. Reese sipped his margarita—icy sweet, pulped strawberries and a very nice golden tequila—and put it back on the recliner’s attached tray. In the brilliant sunlight his toes seemed to glow white, and he wiggled them. For some reason he found bare feet comforting. That was half the fun of a tropical resort—well, maybe a third—going around barefoot.

A shadow fell over them—their travelling companions, Lois and J.J. Prudhoe, returning with another drinks tray and a platter of fruit. Reese liked Lois, but something about J.J. bothered him. Perhaps it was just that the man didn’t have a real job, and was perpetually almost-smirking at him as if knew something Reese didn’t.

Reese accepted a piece of pineapple and smiled happily at his wife. “I love bare feet. There’s something about socks that feels unnatural.” He stopped, something shadowy nagging in the back of his mind, something that he should remember.

Socks. Unnatural. What did that remind him of? He couldn’t quite think of it.

His wife watched him, her smile fading. She reached for her purse, an intent look on her face.

There was a white flash over the water, then another, drawing his gaze. Seagulls. What had he been thinking of? He shook his head to clear it, and the pressure to remember dissipated like mist.

Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be that important.

It was, after all, only socks.