30 seconds

It was very realistic. It reminded him at first of that McEwan novel. James had been off chasing Pokemon, yet in the sickening thirty seconds between lost and found, Adam found wonder in the brutal clarity of horror; how he wasn’t experiencing this panic to tell of it later, he was living every eternal second. And between those seconds, as adrenaline surged, he recalled a time when Laura found it sexy when he bent over a pool table and the moment was so real, so clear, that finding James, sitting hunched over his phone, was something of an anti-climax.