Theo entered the kitchen behind Annie and watched her gaze through the window, her open coat falling slightly off one shoulder.
She hadn’t bothered with makeup, and standing in this kitchen from the past, she could have been a farm woman from the 1930s.
Her bold eyes and abundance of unruly hair didn’t conform to contemporary standards of manufactured beauty. She was a creature unto herself. He could imagine the makeover his sister and her fashion-forward friends would have ordered up if they’d had the chance. Chemically straightening Annie’s hair, fillers to plump her lips to crazy proportions, breast implants, and a little liposuction, although he couldn’t imagine where. But the only thing with how Annie looked was nothing at all. Theo could not point out any fault. However, he noted the layer of sweat on her skin courtesy of the faulty cooling equipment. It was in the dead of summer, and the farmhouse’s HVAC system had broken down just before dawn. After he called the cooling company, he could only wait for a cooling technician. He had changed the air filter a fortnight before, so there was little he could do to improve the indoor air quality other than wait for a/c service. Even with the heat, Annie looked quite at home. The cooling specialist arrived at noon. Theo showed him the a/c setup and left him to work on it. When the cooling expert finished fixing the climate control system, he told Theo to look into the latest cooling technology because he would need to replace the entire unit in a year or less. After the HVAC maintenance, the air conditioner was up and running.