As he stared, Peter regretted sending her that email. She needed more care, not more to read. It was time to address her personal life directly. After all, Sophie ate dinner with them every night at home. From a distance, she had the same coloring as Zack and Benji.
He cleared his throat.
Sophie jolted.
“Why don’t we go to my study,” he suggested.
Sophie grabbed her notebook—its weathered pages stacked in waves—and followed. Upstairs, they passed Zack’s and Benji’s empty rooms on their way to the end of the hall. In Peter’s study, bookcases replaced wallpaper. Every shelf had more books than room for them. Hard- and softcovers stuffed the space above rows stacked two deep and stood in tall piles on the floor. Peter sat in an armchair with a soft, tasseled blanket hanging over the arm. He offered Sophie its twin facing him. He looked uncomfortable despite plush back cushions. Sophie shut the door behind them and sat with caution. Peter tented his fingertips.
“I’ve known you now, awhile?” he began.
She nodded.
“From day one of your first year in college. And here we are, in your second year as a PhD.” He bounced his fingertips off each other, thinking there was only one way to help her. If it compromised their work, so be it. “Maggie is so fond of you. As are Zack and Benji. They don’t show it as much, but they care. We always want you to feel welcome here.”
“I do.”
“I think now’s a good time to tell you a bit more about myself.” He decided to ease into it. “Part of the reason why Maggie and I clicked was timing. Part of it was we both cared about our work, and I loved how kind she was. People without strong personalities can get described as ‘nice’ in the filler sense of the word, meaning they have no notable qualities whatsoever. But Maggie is remarkably, proactively nice in a way I never was and always admired. Most important, she and I always had the same idea of family. For better or worse, we wanted to stick together and create our own. Some people have that in them. Some don’t. We consider you part of our family. You always have another home with us.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course.” He paused. “Maggie and I’ve been together almost our whole lives, but we waited a while to have children. When she got pregnant, we were in our thirties. It was a very special time for us. We’d imagined having children together for so long. We had the boys. We’d always wanted three. When she got pregnant again, we were going to have a girl. I think she still has the clothes.” He wrung his hands. “She was older by then. The doctors always said losing her was a possibility. For some reason, we always imagined three.”
He cleared his throat.
“I haven’t talked about this in years,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“The boys don’t know, either. I’m telling you this to say I know what it’s like to lose someone special, irreplaceable. We have two sons, but they don’t replace Annie. I’ve learned there’s no getting over, but there is moving on. There is life after loss. It’s not the same, and you always remember, but it doesn’t have to hold you back. I’m not trying to intrude. You don’t have to tell me anything. I only know what I see in you. And I recognize it.”
In grief, as he well knew, time appeared to stop. The rest of the world kept going and growing, but grievers didn’t. They were locked in the past as they revisited old photos, mementos, and memories, asking themselves if they’d really done everything they could. They struggled with everything they’d never do again with the one they lost. It was like being frozen on the edge of a black hole—or experiencing block theory—and the signs were all over Sophie. She looked the same way she had when she stepped foot into Time Theory. Peter wondered if she was wearing the same hoodie, if that hoodie was his.
“I know what it looks like,” she said. “But I didn’t lose him.”
Peter furrowed his brow.
“I think we’re still together. Just… not…” Sophie moved her hands back and forth as if she were pumping an invisible accordion. It was a motion they’d made before to describe the way a person is spread out in a block of space-time.
“Not… right here?” Peter prompted.
“Exactly. Not here, but—”
“Now.”
She nodded.
Peter tapped his long fingers with unusual slowness. Her sadness weighed on his jitters. He still knew nothing about the man allegedly sharing the moment with them. He only saw Sophie, how tightly she clung to her journal, how intently she worked, and everything she was sacrificing all these years later to hold onto the idea of them. The fate of block theory and her old relationship were intertwined. If it were true, they really were still together. He really was still with Annie. Maggie and he were still meeting for the first time. There was something desperately sad about Sophie’s quest, but something heroic about it, too. He hoped that the love of her life—whoever he was, wherever he was—knew the value of what he’d lost.
“Well,” he said at last, “that bastard better deserve it.”
* * *
The next day, Jake eyed his phone in the elevator up to Olympus. His broad shoulders tapered to a slim waist under his tailored suit. He was focused and calm to the point of surgical steadiness until Lionel’s name graced his in-box.
A minute?
Lionel Padington
CEO, Padington Associates
Usually, when Lionel wanted to talk—asking questions as one of Jake’s investors, or offering advice as his mentor—he just walked across the floor and into Jake’s office. The double doors branded PADINGTON ASSOCIATES faced the pair bearing OLYMPUS, its offshoot now managing $52 million. Jake had grown Lionel’s seed money over 20 percent every year, and the staggering feat had enticed other pocketbooks. He employed four recent college grads and a twenty-four-year-old with only a high school diploma. All were whip-smart, driven kids who’d been rejected everywhere else for lack of experience. They acted eager to stay on a winning team in the highest paid industry in the world.
A minute?
Yesterday, they’d talked for an hour. Lionel had knocked on Jake’s door wanting to know more about his massive new investment in Roxster. In Lionel’s view, it was a strange choice for Olympus. Jake had always bet on proven companies that modeled themselves after winners of the past. But Roxster was a small new smartwatch company. It invested so much in research, it didn’t turn a profit. Its pipeline of future products was untested. In rebuttal, Jake compared Roxster to Apple and other tech giants, but Lionel didn’t appear satisfied. Eventually, Lionel wearied and sipped his cold half-thermos of coffee. Before he left, he mentioned Giulia’s birthday party next week and asked Jake if he’d like that plus one. “No, sir.”
Jake strode through the doors of Padington Associates. He speed-walked by people barking on headsets until a scalding slap on his chest stopped him.
“Fuck!”
Hot coffee dripped down his shirt.
A bespectacled assistant froze with a tray of Starbucks cups.
“I’m so sorry, Jake.”
“I shouldn’t yell. It’s my fault.”
The assistant dabbed at his shirt with a brown napkin.
“Please, don’t worry about it,” Jake said.
“Hi, Jake,” two young men in Padington vests said as they passed. Jake didn’t hear them. He took another napkin from the tray and joined her in drying his shirt. He tried to tell her it was all right. When she finished fretting over him, he made his way to Lionel’s corner office, knocked on the open door. Lionel stood by the window with one hand in his pocket. He seemed less animated than usual as he waved Jake in and stared at the brown blotch on his shirt. Lionel sat at his desk and offered Jake the chair across from him.
“I wanted to have a talk,” Lionel said slowly.
“Is everything okay?”
Lionel rested one hand, his wrist limp, on a stack of papers in front of him.
“Yesterday, I asked you about a plus one to Giulia’s party. It’s a minor detail�
��whether or not you bring anyone—but it got me thinking. About how hard you work. How much time you spend here.” Lionel paused. “Are you happy?”
His eyes squinted doubtfully.
“Yes, of course.”
Lionel grunted.
“I won’t say this again, son. If you’re not happy, it isn’t worth it.”
“I’m happy!” The words came back at Lionel so quickly after his advice that they sounded reflexive, not a product of any introspection.
“Do me a favor. Go do something for yourself.”
“Yes, of course.”
“No,” Lionel snapped. He recovered himself. “Think about it. For a second. Digest what I’m saying. How old are you now?”
Jake paused.
“I am twenty-eight.” Jake left space between each word.
“Are you seeing anyone?” Jake hadn’t mentioned a woman’s name since Sophie Jones in college. With the hours he logged in the office, Lionel doubted the boy had sat down for a face-to-face date in years. As the silence stretched, Lionel became convinced not only that the answer was no, but that answers to derivative and related questions were no: no upcoming dates, no thoughts of them, no intention of them, and no plain vanilla guy friends in the mix, either, relationships that required only a beer every few months to maintain. “Okay, don’t answer that. But think about it. Think about who’ll be at your finish line. If no one comes to mind, you won’t make it. It won’t be worth it. You need other people, or at least to enjoy yourself more. I know you’re gifted, but you’re a human being. You can’t double down on work forever. That’s not success, and it’s not sustainable. Things that aren’t balanced fall down.”
Jake collected himself. Lionel had never intervened in his personal life. Their bond had been forged over their shared identity as self-starters and relentless workers. For Lionel to step in and tell Jake to relax—maybe he had gone off the deep end. As Jake let the pause be, though, he didn’t feel criticized as much as he felt cared for. Lionel was looking out for him.
Lionel’s expression softened as Jake wrestled with the advice. He was a stellar kid—imperfect, outstanding. On the floor, his nickname was Einstein. The boy was too intimidating for people to say it to his face, so it stayed behind-the-back. Yes, Jake posted genius results, and Einstein was a genius. But Einstein was also famous for disarray: messy hair, a cluttered desk. He never wore socks. He never learned his own phone number. In a similar way, Jake didn’t see people standing right in front of him. He sometimes asked his assistant if he’d eaten lunch. He never remembered what day of the week it was. At first, Lionel had found it amusing. Then endearing when he realized that Jake’s strength—allowing him to channel all of his energy into one lane of life at a time—was a vulnerability, too. Jake might not have noticed his lack of personal life. Everyone needed help now and then.
“If you want to talk more—about anything—I’ll be here.”
“Thank you.”
“Course, son.”
Lionel shooed him away, overly dismissive to correct for the intimacy. After Jake left, Lionel stared ahead at the photo of them shaking hands by the Olympus doors. Lionel liked how similar they looked in that shot, like the same person thirty years apart. That had been taken on Jake’s first morning in the new office. Had the boy stopped working since then? His dedication was supernatural, sure, but the most unusual thing about Jake’s work ethic was that it had soul. He loved what he did. It wasn’t right for someone with spirit like that to be alone. Lionel never had found out what had happened between Jake and Sophie. He figured that girl must’ve broken Jake’s heart from the way he moped around for months after.
Jake strode back into Olympus. His analysts sat in an open floor plan with Tawny, his assistant, a single mom Janice’s age. Everyone turned an inch toward him as he passed. He stayed in his own mental tunnel. In his office, he sat in the black chair he’d saved from his dorm room office in college. “Enjoy yourself more.” How was he supposed to do that?
* * *
Jake trailed the realtor’s high-heeled strut into a $60k-per-month penthouse two weeks later. His only free time that week had come at 10:15 p.m. on a Saturday night. They were alone in the apartment. Beyond her—Stacy? Was that her name?—sleek brown hair, which reflected every chandelier here, floor-to-ceiling windows framed a panoramic view of New York City. Manhattan looked like his own personal backyard. Jake nodded, impressed.
“Is it big enough?” Stacy asked.
She arched a thin eyebrow. Jake had the distinct impression she was flirting with him. As she gave him the brochure, her red nails grazed his palm. They began the tour. Every one of the three bedrooms had a walk-in closet and terrace. The building had a seventy-foot saltwater pool next to bocce courts, as well as a golf simulator. He’d have access to a chauffeured Lexus at any time. He nodded. At least Stacy moved quickly. The last tour he’d endured had been led by a man who’d gone into excruciating detail about the “rustic yet glamorous” trellis pattern on the walls. This handful of tours was the most social he’d been in months, maybe years. So far, the only thing they’d accomplished was to remind Jake he didn’t get along with most people.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“This building has great perks for kids. Now, the best for last.” Stacy handed Jake one of two bubbling champagne flutes on a table beside double doors. She took the other for herself. Clink. She pushed the door open to reveal a king bed under a skylight of the same size. “This is my favorite part.” She pointed up. “It’s the best view in the whole city.” Her tight pencil skirt allowed only small steps as she moved to the corner. When she turned off the lights, she turned on emphasis to the sky. The dark view was almost starless, barely freckled with white.
“See?” she said. “There’s one.”
Jake looked at the pinprick she referenced.
“That’s not a star,” he said.
“Hm?”
“That’s Venus,” he said. “It’s a planet.”
“Planet, star.” She treated them as synonyms.
“They’re different.”
Jake and Sophie lay in their bed sophomore winter. Outside their window, the Milky Way glittered. Sophie pointed at two radiant orbs and identified Venus next to Uranus. Both glowed next to Pisces, the V shape she’d already taught him. Jake tried to memorize the scene. She crooked her leg across him under a blanket up to their chins.
“Do a moon one,” Jake said.
On command, Sophie pointed to Jupiter and its four moons. She named the space lab when it whizzed by like a cosmic firefly.
“Do you ever run out of things to teach me?” he asked.
She laughed.
“Are you ever just like, ‘Shit shit shit what now?’ ”
“Not really.”
She kissed his cheek.
“Can you see the markings on the moon?” she asked.
“You’re so beautiful.”
“The shadows?” she prompted.
“Oh.” He looked out the window again. “Yeah.”
“The moon doesn’t have an atmosphere. That means no air. No wind. So, everything on the moon—all the craters, astronaut boot prints, everything—will always be there. There’s no water to wash it away. Whatever marks are up there will be there a million years from now.” Meanwhile, Jake brought her hand to his mouth. He pressed her fingertips to his lips in a slow kiss. “But I like that. On Earth, life cycles are so short. Down here, everything’s always changing and decaying. In space, it’s different. If you touch two pieces of metal together in the vacuum, they fuse together forever. After that, you can’t break them apart.”
He kissed the top of her head.
“Another one?” he asked.
“All right,” she said.
She nestled in his arms.
“So, everything in the universe is made of atoms, right?” she started. He nodded, nuzzling his chin up and down against the side of her head. “I
nside every atom, there’s a nucleus surrounded by electrons in clouds. These clouds aren’t that close to nucleus. There’s a lot of empty space…” She trailed off. “What I’m saying is, we think of the world as solid, but most of it isn’t. Almost all matter—more than 99.9 percent of it—is empty space. If you took all that space out of our atoms, the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.”
“I believe it.”
“Well, good. It’s true.”
He laughed.
“I just meant that when you think about people, the things that stand out about them aren’t what you can see and touch, right?” he said. “Does that make sense? I don’t know. There’s a lot more to you than just what I see.”
It was the longest flashback he’d ever had. When it ended, he still felt her with him. Her presence was in the master bedroom, inside him, everywhere.
It hadn’t gotten any easier for him to deal with the visions. They were all-consuming and packed with details he’d forgotten, down to the specific spray of stars, the spearmint toothpaste on his tongue, and how free it felt to be that young again, in the thick of the greatest luxury on earth: time with the one he loved.
He’d never told anyone about his episodes. No one would believe him. The difference between remembering a moment and being in it was instantly felt, impossible to convey. But he knew. When a flashback hit, he just knew he was in that moment as much as he was here now. It had occurred to him that maybe he’d left so much of his heart in those times with Sophie, he had to rotate among them as a way to stay whole. He’d spread himself out, and the flashbacks held him together. Of course, that didn’t make sense, but he accepted the idea like a spiritual truth irreconcible with fact. He missed her every day.
The Love Proof Page 13