Chapter 18 #2
I teach my students that love is nothing more than neurochemistry.
Dopamine, oxytocin, a feedback loop the brain generates and sustains until, inevitably, it doesn’t.
Romance has a documented shelf life—eighteen months on average, sometimes less.
After that it becomes a decision: stay or leave, build something tenable or abandon it entirely.
I used to find this framework comforting, almost liberating.
If I could reduce love to its constituent parts, map its predictable trajectory, then perhaps I could control the outcome.
After Rebecca, I told myself I’d wait. After Emma’s in college, after the acute phase of single parenthood has passed, then maybe I could attempt a relationship again.
I’d meet someone at a faculty mixer, perhaps, or through a colleague.
Someone who wouldn’t demand I reconstruct my entire existence to accommodate them.
We’d share pleasant dinners, a bottle of wine on the weekends, maybe an annual trip somewhere like Florence or Versailles.
But then there’s Annie, who leaves everything—her family, her fiancé, a wedding that probably costs more than my annual salary—because she refuses to spend her life with someone who doesn’t adore her, because she wants a Great Love or nothing at all.
At first, I thought she’d been naive. I thought she didn’t understand how the world works, how love works.
But maybe I was the one with the limited perspective.
Maybe I’d convinced myself that what I had with Rebecca was a Great Love because I needed it to be at the time.
We got engaged, we had a child—it was the path of least resistance.
It was love-adjacent. It was a comfortable, low-stakes arrangement that collapsed because there wasn’t enough friction to keep us warm.
Annie is the friction. She’s a challenge. She makes me want to be the version of myself I haven’t seen in years—the one who is brave enough to be honest.
I’ve spent years reducing love to chemical equations when maybe the whole point is that it defies measurement.
It’s different every time. Every person rewrites what it means for you, changes who you are inside of it.
There is no control group, no reliable data set.
What happened before tells you almost nothing about what might happen next.
And I think I want a Great Love, too. I want it with a ferocity that surprises me, that feels almost indecent at thirty-two with a failed engagement and a daughter who’s terrified everyone’s going to leave her.
I thought I’d forfeited the right to want like this—thought it was the province of younger men, unbroken men, men who hadn’t already proven themselves capable of spectacular failure.
But the wanting is there anyway, persistent, undeniable.
I want to believe I deserve it. That I’m not a fool for wanting it.
Maybe I deserve to be seen—not just tolerated, or managed, or scheduled.
I deserve someone who looks at the topsy-turvy disaster of my life and decides that the view is worth the climb.
Maybe I deserve something extraordinary after all. Maybe I could deserve Annie.
The thought is terrifying because it requires hope, and hope is the most dangerous chemical in the human body. It’s the belief that the future isn’t just a repeat of the past, that it won’t all fall apart.
Annie and Emma are strolling toward me now, the empty bread bag dangling from Annie’s fingers, crinkling faintly in the breeze.
The wind kicks up just right, sweeping her hair back over her shoulders in a tousled cascade, and she lets out this laugh at whatever Emma’s babbling about—her nose crinkling, the fine lines bunching at the bridge.
It’s such a small thing, but damn, it gets me every time.
“We have a situation,” Annie says as they reach me, her eyes bright and reflecting the slate-gray of the water behind her. “Apparently, the Mayor is a hard taskmaster. Emma’s worked up an appetite.”
I reach down and scoop up Emma’s hand, her palm warm and a little gritty from the crumbs. “Is that right? What’s on the menu, koukla?”
“Sal’s!” she announces immediately.
I knit my brows, shooting Annie a quizzical look. “Sal’s? Is that code for some underground toddler speakeasy?”
She grins, tucking the bag into her back pocket. “It’s a pretzel stand near the playground. We go sometimes after the park.”
“Sal’s mustache is like a caterpillar,” Emma chimes in, dead serious, her free hand gesturing wildly. “And he gives me extra salt ‘cause I’m special.”
“Extra salt? You’re going to turn into a pretzel, Bug.”
Emma rolls her eyes. “You can’t turn into food, Daddy. That’s silly.”
“Is it? Because I’m pretty sure it happened to a guy in a fairy tale once.”
“That was gingerbread,” she counters, swinging my hand as we start to walk. “That’s a cookie. Pretzels are bread. It’s totally different science.”
Annie’s biting her lip, shoulders shaking with a laugh. “She’s got you cornered, Professor.”
“Fair point,” I concede, chuckling as we amble along the path, Emma tugging us forward like a tiny tour guide.
She’s got her camera glued to her eye now, clicking away at the world: a street juggler mid-toss, balls arcing in blurry rainbows; a shaggy dog in a knit sweater, tongue lolling like it’s mid-pant; even a random patch of sky, framed by skeletal branches scratching at the blue, the leaves rustling as if they’re giving a distance applause.
“You gonna have any film left for the ride home?” I ask, dodging a rogue cyclist.
“Tons,” she mumbles, not looking up. “Annie says you gotta capture everything or you miss the good stuff.”
I glance at Annie, who’s smirking. “Guilty as charged.”
Emma halts abruptly, pivoting to face us. “I know! We need a picture of all of us!”
The air in my lungs does a weird little hitch. “All of us?”
She shrugs, already looking back through the viewfinder. “I want it on the fridge. Next to my drawing of the shark.”
My throat clenches, this sudden swell that catches me off guard. “Sure thing, kiddo.” I meet Annie’s eyes; her cheeks are blooming pink. “You in?”
“Absolutely,” she says, soft but sure.
A couple’s passing by—thirty somethings in matching Columbia hoodies, and a dog that looks better groomed than I am. I flag them down with a sheepish grin and my most non-threatening Dad Voice. “Hey, sorry to interrupt—mind snapping one for us?”
The woman smiles, reaching for the plastic camera, but then she pauses, tapping the bulky Polaroid slung around her neck. “You want one from this instead? I’ve got plenty of film, and the light is actually perfect right now.”
Emma’s eyes go wide. “For real?”
The woman laughs. “For real. It’s magic—you get to watch it appear.”
I scoop Emma up, settling her on my hip. She’s clutching Barnaby, her stuffed rabbit—the one with the one-eyed stare and the matted fur that’s survived every tantrum since birth. I tuck her between me and Annie, pulling them both in close.
“Okay, on three,” the woman says, peering through the viewfinder. “One, two, three…cheese!”
We beam, full-wattage smiles that ache a little but feel earned, and the camera whirs to life.
“One more?” she offers.
“Yes!” Emma yelps before we can blink, cracking us both up.
“Alright—one, two, three—”
I dip in, pressing a kiss to Emma’s cheek; Annie mirrors me on the flip side, our faces mashing hers in a goofy sandwich. She erupts in this belly laugh, wriggling with delight.
“Adorable,” the woman says, passing over the squares. “You’ve got a beautiful family there.”
“Thank you,” I reply, the words sticking a bit—not correcting her, because hell, it doesn’t feel wrong.
“Let me see! Let me see!” Emma demands, twisting in my arms.
We huddle together as the colors begin to bleed through the gray.
It’s like watching a memory form in real-time.
The first one is classic—all of us smiling, the trees a hazy, nostalgic green.
But the second one…that’s the one. Emma’s face is squeezed into a joyful grimace, her nose scrunched, Barnaby’s ears flopping.
Annie and I are just blurred silhouettes of affection on either side of her.
The colors are warm and slightly overexposed, giving it the feel of something that happened thirty years ago, something timeless.
Emma grabs the pictures, holding them to her chest. “These are staying on the fridge forever and ever.”
“Forever’s ambitious,” I tease. “What if we run out of magnets?”
“Don’t care. Forever times infinity.”
Without overthinking it, I reach for Annie’s hand—our fingers slotting together like they’ve done it a hundred times—and we keep walking, the path winding toward Sal’s, the salty scent already teasing the air.
Emma’s gaze drops, locking on our hands, her mouth forming a little O. “Daddy…are you and Annie boyfriend-girlfriend now?”
I arch a brow. “How do you know what a boyfriend is?”
She folds her arms and looks up at me as if to say please, Dad. “I’ve had boyfriends, Daddy. Like Will from school.”
“What?” I say, stopping and looking down at her. “Emma! You’re not allowed to have a boyfriend. No boyfriends. Not for a long time. Got it?”
“How long?” she pouts.
“Sixty years.”
“Is that a long time?”
I smirk. “A very long time.”
Emma’s eyes move to our hands again. “Well…are you?”
“We’re not quite there yet,” I say, dropping into a crouch until I’m eye-level with her. I beckon her closer with a finger, like I’m about to spill big secrets, and she leans in, her breath warm against my ear, eyes wide.
“But I really want her to be,” I whisper, the words feeling surprisingly light now that they’re out of my head. “One day. Is that okay with you, Bug?”
Emma taps her chin, a gesture she definitely stole from me when I’m grading particularly questionable midterms. She leans in even closer and whispers, “Does that mean she’ll be around all the time? Instead of just sometimes?”