Epilogue
PETE AND brIDESMAID Two didn’t last, by the way. Let’s get that out of the way right now. A force of nature like Pete can’t be contained.
But guess who did last?
Grandma Dodie and her new friend, Edward. They’ve already signed up for another cruise. Together.
My parents lasted, too. Thank god. For my dad’s sake, if no one else’s.
My dad didn’t take the promotion—in fact, he scaled back his hours—and he never talked about selling our house ever again.
My mother took to showing him all her household bookkeeping, just to help him stop worrying, and it became a little joint hobby for them.
They were never going to be Rockefellers, my mom loved to say, but they were just fine.
I think my dad found it soothing. And my mom liked the way he gained a whole new appreciation for the household systems she’d been running all these years.
It was the most affectionate I’d ever seen them.
They weren’t, like, chasing each other around the living room sofa like twenty-year-olds or anything.
They were just … content. Just peaceful.
They signed up for a beginner Spanish class so they could plan a trip to Mexico City and see the pyramids.
They built a raised vegetable garden and started researching heirloom varieties.
They got matching pedometers and started taking walks in the evenings after supper.
I took on the job of trying to help my dad grow as a person—forcing him loudly at family dinners to take credit for sweet things he’d secretly done, and outing him over and over. “Dad filled up Mom’s gas tank today,” I’d announce to everybody. “Isn’t that romantic?”
“What’s romantic about gas?” Pete would ask.
“If I have to explain it to you,” I’d say, “you don’t deserve to know.”
It embarrassed my dad beyond words to be praised like that, but I didn’t stop.
“This is good for you,” I’d say, slapping him on the shoulder. “It’s only making you stronger.”
The one thing I couldn’t square with my new sense of my dad was his problem with names. It was really bothering me. It didn’t fit. How could anyone—honestly—be so bad with names?
Guess what?
I googled it, and there’s a real condition called nominal aphasia …
where you can’t remember names. My dad’s not the kind of guy who’ll ever go in for official testing on that.
But just knowing that condition exists, and knowing that he fits all the diagnostic criteria—that’s plenty for me.
And I made sure this was front-page family news.
It wasn’t that our dad didn’t care enough to remember our names.
It was that he had a genuine, diagnosed-off-the-internet neurodivergence.
My dad thought it was all hooey, by the way.
But I thought it explained everything.
I regret how we saw him before. The working too much, the never taking credit, the forgetting names … we used it against him. We never questioned it. We never looked deeper for underlying patterns—or tried to understand why.
I’m sorry for all the time we wasted. I’m sorry we misjudged him. But I know that sometimes you can’t solve the problem until you solve the problem.
MY PARENTS WEREN’T the only happily married couple in the family. The newlywed Cockburns were also doing well—and I’m happy to report that becoming literal relatives with me did help Brody work through his bitterness about me dumping him in high school.
Eventually.
Ashley and Brody bought a fixer-upper and decided to renovate it all by themselves—despite the fact that neither of them was particularly handy.
The family got a betting pool going on how long it would take.
My mother, ever the optimist, predicted three years, and my dad predicted five—but my money was on ten.
Still, despite a brief mold problem from a plumbing leak, a possum infestation under the pier-and-beam living room, and a moment when they worried a door in the attic that kept slamming by itself might be a ghost, my sister and newest brother were moving forward on All Things Married with verve.
“You and Cooper should get engaged,” Ashley kept pulling me aside to say. “Lock Cooper down before he comes to his senses.”
“Noted,” I’d say.
“How can you be so chill about this?” Ashley would demand.
“There’s no rush to get engaged,” I’d say.
And there really wasn’t.
Because we were already engaged.
It turned out Cooper really hadn’t been kidding about wanting to get married.
One of the things he’d been doing on Bishop’s Cay while I was wandering around looking for him was buying us rings.
Not fancy rings, of course—tourist rings carved out of conch shells.
Twenty-dollar rings. You might barely notice we have them on.
But we do have them on.
The night we got together, we stayed up until sunrise. And sometime around three AM we found ourselves sitting on Cooper’s balcony, watching the moon over the ocean.
“Remember when you wanted to get married earlier?” I said.
“Of course.”
“I might have overreacted a bit on that.”
“Might have?”
“Says the man who once threw up a corn dog when he had to kiss me.”
“I blame the corn dog.”
“But,” I went on, “I actually think it’s a good idea.”
“What is?”
“Getting married.”
“You do?”
I met his eyes. “I do.”
And at that, he was out of his deck chair and down on his knees in front of mine. “If I propose to you right now, will you say yes?”
I took in the sight of him like that, with the moon and the ocean behind him.
“Because if you’re not joking,” Cooper went on, “it’s happening.”
I could tell he was serious, and I could have backed off right then. I could have waved him away and laughed. I knew just from his expression that he was going to do it unless I stopped him.
So I didn’t stop him.
Instead, very deliberately, looking into his eyes, I said, “I’m not joking.”
And so he took the seaglass ring he’d once given me off my hand. And then we put new rings on each other. And then we got engaged—and started dating.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Pork Pie? Was he brought to justice?
Yeah—no.
We reported him … and nothing else ever came of it.
I hate to say it, and I’m sorry if this is news, but we live in a world where villains pull off a lot of villainry.
I wish it were different, but I don’t know how to change it. All I know how to do is hang out with good people—keep on being as non-villainous as I can.
In the end, Pork Pie got to slash Cooper, and Cooper got … a scar.
A scar that he thinks is “cool” and that he loves to show off at the beach, but a scar all the same.
That’s the truth. Pork Pie got away with it.
But Cooper got … me.
A willing, adoring, and wildly enthusiastic me. A me who’s as heart-meltingly dedicated to Cooper’s happiness as he is to mine.
In case you needed proof that it’s better to be the good guy.
AND SO, IN the end, my problem set of love … got solved.
After I spent endless years working the puzzle, the pieces finally clicked into place.
It took me so long to see the pattern. The irrational series of interactions with Cooper that formed a continuous line: He had always loved me. And I had always loved him back.
Suddenly, now, in the wake of it all, I could see the elegance of it—the artistry under all the human chaos.
Love turned out to be math, after all—complex, and hidden, and so hard to unearth, but there.
Most of us never get fluent enough in the language of math to see its beauty.
Maybe that’s true of love, as well. But the beauty is there, all the same.
Quietly there, and undiscovered—until it isn’t.
Seeing all these deep patterns between Cooper and me probably made me a better person. But I know for sure it made me better at math.
After letting myself fall in love with him, for the first time in my life, I understood how love is not just an underlying structure holding our human universe together, but also a glimpse of something divine.
Something awe-inspiring and infinite. Not the kind of infinite that’s out there far away, like the stars, but the kind of infinite that’s embedded in us—and between us.
A pattern we follow, yes, but a pattern we also create.
An emotional structure built out of the mathematical principles of who we are.
I think about how sculptors sometimes describe the chiseling process as discovering the art inside the marble. Or the poet who said, “Our real poems are already in us, and all we can do is dig.” That’s math, too: As much discovery as creation. Learning to see beauty that’s already there.
It’s life, and it’s math, and it’s art, and it’s love—all different and the same, all chaos and patterns, all unknowable but known.
When I was first learning math, I had to visualize its concepts to find answers. But the more fluent I got, the more the answers became things I had to feel.
And isn’t that what all the searching we do is for, in the end?
Not just to see our lives, but to feel them.
It was a conjecture I was happy to spend the rest of my life trying to prove: that the pattern of Cooper and me … would turn out to be infinite.