Epilogue #2
With the exception of Harold, who had returned to America to become a physician, my friends from Cambridge were also in attendance.
Interestingly enough, Will had just proposed to Lady Petal, who had accepted his suit after leading him on a merry chase.
To my immense relief, she had finally found her own very loyal, very loving tree!
The twins, to no one’s surprise, had abandoned joining the priesthood and were hired as the brilliant comanagers to The Collective instead—the clergy’s loss had been our gain. Klaus had gleefully reported that our old nemesis James had been jailed after being found guilty of embezzlement.
Blake, my long-standing best friend, also worked for The Collective.
He was chairman and head of the founding committee, and as a primary investor, responsible for overseeing our rapidly growing membership and ensuring we always had a diverse range of scholars for debate and intellectual engagement from learned societies in England and beyond.
As chairman, he was tasked with executing our mission of using knowledge to improve society and leaving the world better than we’d come into it.
He showed absolutely no signs of settling down or abandoning his roguish ways.
My cousin-in-crime, Ansel, had gone back abroad, and he was now currently somewhere in China based on his last correspondence. I missed him terribly, but I loved reading about his travel adventures. He was making a name for himself as a cultural explorer and anthropologist.
As we walked through the ballroom, surrounded by so much love and joy, I couldn’t help but be thankful for everything Tarik and I had accomplished together. We’d made mistakes, but more importantly, we’d learned from them…and kept going.
Tears fell as I saw my mama’s beaming smile and my father’s proud expression.
He’d believed in Tarik, too, at every step of the way, his confidence never faltering.
I loved him so much for that, but as he’d said, no woman with probability skills like mine would ever not back a winner.
They had left my baby brother, Bowen, who was now eight and proving to be yet another mathematics prodigy, at home.
I snorted. The apples stayed close to the tree in this family.
After the official toast was made by Papa, my husband escorted me into the first waltz of the evening. As Tarik took me in his arms, I couldn’t help remembering the first time we had done this, four years ago.
I tipped my head back and drowned in those lapis lazuli eyes. “Monsieur?”
“Oui, chérie?”
“Do you like puzzles?”
His lips curved upward as he spun me in an intricate turn, the strength in his arms making me lose my train of thought for a second. “I do.”
“Two lovers—let’s call them the astronomer and the tutor—leave two destinations sixty miles apart. The astronomer travels east at seven miles per hour and the tutor west at five miles per hour. In how many hours will they get to kiss, and how far will they each have gone?”
“Why is the astronomer faster?” he asked with a chuckle. “The tutor has notably longer legs.”
“The astronomer is highly motivated for this kiss.”
His lips dropped to my lips, and he grinned.
“Say the time of the kiss is x, then the astronomer travels seven x and the utterly smitten but tragically slow tutor travels five x. If seven x plus five x equals sixty, then twelve x equals sixty, so the value of x is five.” Drawing me into his arms with no thought to anyone around us, he grazed the shell of my ear, then my cheek, and then my forehead with his lips.
“He kisses the love of his life after five hours, after she has walked thirty-five miles and he has walked twenty-five, even though he’ll walk a thousand for her and then a thousand more, whatever it takes to be in her presence once again. ”
“Full marks,” I whispered with a shiver, that mind of his my utter weakness.
“Did you have any doubt?” he asked, and I shook my head. He was the one constant in my world. We weren’t even dancing now, only swaying in the middle of the other couples. But this was our universe, and we were its nucleus with our loved ones orbiting all around us.
“Gravity is a strange thing, isn’t it?” I mused, thinking about life. “It explains the planets in orbit, but no one truly knows how the planets formed.”
Tarik pursed his lips. “Scientific laws can explain only so much. I suppose the existential questions about how we came to be here will always persist.”
“Perhaps it’s a bit like love when you think about it. Transcendent.”
Love wasn’t a law like gravity; it was the ultimate paradox.
It was contradictory and impossible to predict.
There were no universal rules governing its existence.
It took work and sacrifice. Trial and error.
Unflinching persistence. One could only keep it if it was unencumbered.
It was beauty and devastation, and every moment in between—and perhaps like the universe of stars, a series of impacts and collisions built and collapsed over time.
It was magical. It was real.
A love like ours was whatever we wanted it to be.
“Your heart is my gravity,” I whispered.
My husband smiled. “As yours is mine…binary stars, forever.”