Epilogue Seven Months Later
It’s Friday, the middle of the day, and someone pounds on the door so hard I worry they’ll punch a hole through it.
But then the lock turns and the door opens.
Thud, thud, creak, go the stairs, and Lewis appears in the center of my oddly shaped living room, rain dripping from his hair onto the collar of his denim jacket.
The dusting of red at the top of his cheeks tells me he hurried here, but the hammer he carries in one hand, and the brown paper package in his other are entirely confusing.
“Have you checked your email?”
All of this plays out in less time than it takes my mind to resurface from the code I’ve been writing.
I blink at Lewis, the urgency in his voice slowly filtering through.
Apparently too impatient to wait for me to catch on, he’s already crossed the room to where I’m sitting at the kitchen table amidst a sea of research papers, a ring-bound manuscript of Brady’s finished first draft of her novel, orange Post-it notes, and three cups with varying quantities of leftover coffee.
“Did you steal Brady’s book again?” he asks as his hands hover over the cluttered surface.
“You read too slowly,” I point out.
“I’m just making sure she’s getting all the science right.”
“Lewis, it’s fantasy, not her PhD thesis! It’s not like there is an objectively true explanation for how werewolves evolved.”
“Whatever,” he grumbles, and finally seems to find a somewhat clear spot to drop his hammer on, effectively messing up my carefully laid-out chaos.
“Now, Dr. North,” I growl at him, but he sweeps me up with a hand around my waist. His hair smells fresh, like the rain that started pelting down this morning right after he left to give his lecture.
“What are you doing here?” I wonder. “Should I be worried?”
But the look in his eyes is fierce, not troubled.
“You,” he says decidedly, “should check your email.”
“Oh.” I gulp down the burst of nerves his words set off.
When I submitted my second grant with Rosanna two months ago, I started treating my inbox like a bomb that’s about to go off.
At first, I was ready to just abandon it, but I’ve been working on my coping mechanisms with my therapist. Now, I open it only when I feel centered enough to deal with the havoc it could wreak.
Even though I have a safe job at Codify, and I enjoy working on the module that’ll teach our younger users how to code a simple memory game, it’s Fridays when I can’t wait to get out of bed in the mornings.
When I get to stay at home, work on my independent research projects or prepare new applications with Rosanna.
On Fridays, it feels like my whole heart is in everything I do: the mind-bending questions and the dreary formatting of figures alike.
Turns out that leaving academia has reignited my love for it, now that it has become a choice.
Now that I’ve understood it’s not just about answering my questions but getting to ask them in the first place.
I miss the wonder and confusion in my day-to-day, the exhilarating feeling of thinking about things nobody else has thought about before.
I still want to make a difference, but the process of getting there has become almost as important.
After the rejection of the first grant, I struggled to keep up my hopes for this second one.
It comes with more funding and, in consequence, is more competitive.
To prepare, I squeezed in time during the winter holidays; on the train ride home to my parents’ before Christmas, on the flight to New York where Lewis and I celebrated New Year’s with Ada and Ben (and I snuck off to have brunch with Vivienne the next day).
But I’d kept my laptop closed that weekend in January when Karo and Lennart came to visit and my sister shared the news that she was pregnant.
Angling my laptop toward me, I finally compute why Lewis has left the lab at this random time on a workday.
The results must be out.
I’m scared, to say the least. Because if this doesn’t work out, maybe it’s time to give up academia for good. Staying at Codify would be a nice kind of future, but I don’t think it’s the one I ultimately want.
“Give me your hand,” Lewis orders gently now. Surely he would tell me if it was bad news. He wouldn’t leave me hanging like this, would he? Or maybe he doesn’t know yet, either?
“Tell me if you know already.” Fizzy unease pumps through my veins and makes my fingers jittery. Some grant agencies announce the awardees publicly at the same time as they send out the individualized decision letters. “Or wait, no. Don’t tell me.”
He only nods at my laptop and waits as I swivel the cursor over the mail icon at the bottom of my screen.
Once. Twice. By now it has almost become a routine, Lewis holding my hand through something I’m afraid of, me saying, “This doesn’t change anything between us,” and him patiently replying, “It doesn’t. ”
“And if it’s a rejection,” I continue with a glance at the hammer, “please don’t destroy my laptop.”
Today’s email changes things between us. Massively.
Lewis cheers and I can’t believe my eyes.
“You knew!” I stab an accusatory finger at him.
He catches my hand and ghosts his lips over my knuckles. “Only that there was an email. Rosanna wouldn’t let me open it with her. But I had a hunch.”
“This is insane,” I say, eyes drawing back to my computer screen and the number with enough zeros to cover research expenses, publication costs, salaries. Mine and two PhD students. For the next five years. “I can’t believe this.”
Lewis looks at me, eyes sparkling and voice brimming with pride.
“You did it,” he confirms, then lets go of me as he hands me the package he brought.
“This is for you.” I tear through the paper and find a picture frame inside, holding a simple line drawing of a brain.
One hemisphere is chaos, a thread unspooled and muddled up, the other one a clean rendering of cortical ridges.
“You know what this means,” Lewis says. His eyes are a mirror for the happiness pumping through my body with each beat of my heart.
“I do?”
“This is your home now.”
With his words, the realization hits me. This one-bedroom apartment on a second floor of a narrow building in De Pijp is, in fact, my home now. Permanently.
“You’re right,” I say and look around. The crooked living-room wall with a slowly growing collection of Polaroids and postcards, the herringbone parquet flooring, the backsplash of pale yellow tiles in the kitchen.
And beyond that, too; the market popping up every day down the street where one of the green grocers has started to recognize me and helps me practice my Dutch skills.
Mila and the rest of my friends at the bouldering gym who I meet for climbing sessions, and for coffee, walks in the park, and Friday night drinks.
All of it feels like I’m slowly arriving somewhere.
Five years of funding means I can take the time to settle down for real. “This is my home now.”
Lewis brushes a strand of hair behind my ear. His voice is quiet as he says, “Ours, if you want it to be.”
I look down at the artwork Lewis has given me, and when he hands me the hammer and I spot the nail he has taped to the handle, I finally understand.
“Are you asking to move in with me?” My voice is hoarse with emotion.
“If you’ll have me.”
My eyebrows draw together. “What about your place?”
“This place is nicer. Farther away from work, which is probably only good. You have a bigger kitchen and I like that third step that is a bit creaky,” he reasons. “And, well. The loft.”
He’s right. Nestled under a gabled roof, the loft may be my favorite part of this whole place.
It reminds me of the bedroom in Lewis’s friend’s cabin in upstate New York.
And in times like these, when rain cloud after rain cloud moves over Amsterdam, the pitter-patter on the roof makes it cozy and magical, like sleeping in a tent.
Minus the damp clothes and back pain the next morning.
“I know things are moving quickly. That you only moved in a few months ago. But I’m living here half of the week anyway, and wish I was here for the other half. There’s more than enough space for the two of us, and with the extra money—”
“Lewis,” I stop him and squeeze his hand. The bliss of this day is almost too much for me to handle. Not just one dream come true, but all of them. I hold on a little tighter to his thumb, to reassure myself that all of this is real. “There’s nothing you have to convince me of.”
“I don’t?”
“Unless you made plans to persuade me over a home-cooked dinner, in which case I’ll gladly have you convince me.”
He ruffles my hair and kisses my temple.
When he draws back, his eyes are dazzling, the crinkles around them full of delight.
I take his hand, grab my present, and pull him to the bottom of the stairs leading up to the loft.
There’s a little nook in the wall that I’d planned on placing a vase of flowers in, but it’s tall enough to fit the picture frame. Something more permanent.
When I’ve hammered the nail into the wall, Lewis hands me the frame, and he closes his arms around me as I hang up the fine copper wire.
“Welcome home,” he says.