Chapter 15
As it turned out, Paige wasn’t a woman, but a teenage girl.
Which Aubrey didn’t mind, though the prospect of finding conversational common ground with someone half her age daunted her.
What were high schoolers into these days, anyway? Parties? Boy bands? At that age, she’d been consumed by mathematics and
her boyfriend. NYU and Nick. Nothing else had existed.
Fortunately, that turned out not to matter, because Paige did most of the talking. Bright-eyed and squeaky-voiced, and with
the perkiest strawberry-blond ponytail Aubrey had ever seen, the girl was like a rainbow transmuted into a person. When Megan
introduced them, billing Aubrey as “a native Hendersonite back for a visit,” Paige pumped Aubrey’s hand, then dove straight
into a discussion about wire framing.
Aubrey half listened, half glanced around the airy barn at the many volunteers. When Nick proved absent, a knot between her
shoulder blades loosened.
“. . . we’ll have to divide up the chicken wire,” Paige was saying. “But first, we’ll need to figure out the dimensions of
the welded skeletons. Those’re made of steel rods, which’ll have to be cut to size.”
“Okay,” Aubrey said.
“You and I are in charge of two floats. A turkey, and one shaped like Indiana. Last year, the planning guys just made drawings
and went for it, but a lot of steel got wasted and the floats didn’t end up being all that big.” She gestured to a pile of
rebar poles. “I thought it’d make more sense to approach it like an optimization problem, so—”
“Wait.” Aubrey’s ears perked. “Did you just say ‘optimization problem’?”
“Oh, gosh, I know.” Paige rolled exceptionally blue eyes, their color nearly on par with the autumn sky. “It’s math, everyone
gets all frowny-faced when I start talking about it, but hey, I love it anyway, and I’m not afraid to tell everyone that I
think”—she made an impromptu megaphone with her hands and pointed it at the broader crowd—“NUMBERS. ARE. AWESOME.”
A few people looked up, then returned to their tasks. Aubrey raised her brows.
Paige dropped her hands, sheepish. “Sorry, I get carried away, sometimes. Everyone says. But math is actually way more useful
than people realize, and right now it’s gonna help us build some really big floats without wasting any rebar. You know, save
the planet, and all that. Doesn’t hurt to impress everybody while we’re at it.”
Aubrey wrestled with a smile. My god, Megan had chosen wisely. This girl was a delight. “I don’t disagree with a single thing
you just said, actually. So how would you put together this optimization problem?”
“Well, for the turkey, we basically need a big sphere, which we can build from four circles, right? And for Indiana, a rectangle
twice as tall as it is wide.”
Aubrey nodded along. “So we’re maximizing the enclosed areas of the circles and rectangle?”
“Yeah, exactly.” Paige’s perky brows winged upward. “Wait, are you a math person?”
Aubrey grinned. “You could say that.”
“Oh, no wonder Megan put us together.” Paige made a squee sound, then pulled a tiny spiral-bound notebook and pencil from her back pocket. “Okay, so it’s easy enough. We just write
an equation that combines the areas of all the shapes, right? We’ll call the radius of the circle X, and the width of the
rectangle Y.”
“Sounds good.”
Paige jotted in the notebook. “This is the equation we’ll maximize, but we can write another relating X to Y, since we know
the perimeters of the circles and rectangle will add up to a hundred and twenty feet of rebar. Solve that function for Y,
plug it back into the first—”
“—then take the derivative and solve for zero,” Aubrey finished.
Paige’s pencil stilled. “Yes. Wait, yes! You’re like, a real math person, aren’t you?”
“If having a PhD in mathematics counts.”
“No way!” Paige squeed again. “A woman after my own heart. But wait, didn’t you say your name is Aubrey? Not . . . Aubrey MacLean? The woman with
all those trophies in the math club cabinet?”
Aubrey pressed a hand to her chest. “Oh, wow. They still have those up?”
“Of course!” Paige hopped up and down. “Oh my gosh. Okay, so don’t get mad, but I’ve been trying to break your trophy record
for forever. This might even be the year. I’ve got sixteen trophies, you’ve got twenty-two. Twenty-two! I mean, you’re a legend.”
Aubrey’s startled laugh filled the barn. “I don’t know about that.” None of her classmates had even acknowledged her trophies,
back when she’d earned them.
“Oh, but you are. All the math clubbers know your name. Mostly because you and I are locked in a heated battle.” Paige giggled.
“Ooh, you know what you should do? Come speak to my club. They’d die of surprise.
My archnemesis, coming to tell us what it’s like to be a math goddess in the real world.
Wait, what is it like to be a math goddess in the real world? Do you—”
As Paige rattled off questions, tension tightened Aubrey’s lungs. Speaking to the math club sounded wonderful on the surface,
but it would mean showing her face at the same high school Nick’s son or daughter attended. Paige probably even knew the kid.
Maybe he was in math club.
A vivid, daydream flash lit her mind. She saw herself walking into the musty old math room, only to confront a lanky sixteen-year-old
with a dark glower and tangled curls.
What would she even say to the living, breathing proof of the heartbreak she’d barely survived?
Except . . . no. She was moving on, now. And kind of, maybe, sort of dating Gallant. Which might make meeting Nick’s kid into
a test, of sorts.
Proof of concept.
Aubrey drew a long breath. The faint itch of hay tickled her nose. “You know what? I’d love to talk to the math club. When
would be best?”
Paige paused just long enough to squeak a victory. “Really? Oh, Mrs. Runge is gonna be so excited. Why don’t I ask her about
scheduling, and I’ll get back to you. Here, do you have your phone? I’ll put in my number and text myself. I promise I won’t
spam you with math questions. Okay, I might spam you with math questions, but you can tell me to back off at any time and I’ll totally respect that.”
Aubrey chortled and obediently handed over her cell, then tucked it back into her pocket when Paige finished. That done, they migrated to a rickety folding table by the window, where they tilted their heads together and planned the rebar cuts.
Paige scribbled numbers without hesitation. The girl was lightning quick and, even more impressive, confident about it. Not
to mention personable and engaged, as if someone had permanently turned her dial up to eleven.
Within the hour, Aubrey’s cheeks ached from smiling. Why hadn’t she realized teenagers could be so . . . fun?
“So, is this what you want to do with your life?” Aubrey asked, when they’d settled on the final configuration for the rebar
skeletons. “Math?”
“No. I mean, I love it and all, but for me, it’s just a piece of the bigger puzzle.”
“The bigger puzzle being . . . ?”
Paige glanced down, her broad grin tempering to something more restrained. “Um. Astrophysics.”
Aubrey sat back. “You want to be an astrophysicist? Really?”
Paige stole a glance from under her lashes, and Aubrey kicked herself for her reaction.
She, of all people, should’ve known better. “Sorry, I just—”
“I know, I know,” Paige said. “I’m only sixteen, I have about a million years to change my mind. Everyone says. But I swear
astrophysics is it. Ever since my dad got me my first telescope when I was ten, I’ve been hooked. The idea of all those stars
out there . . . forming, falling apart, imploding, exploding . . . I mean, they’re beaming light at us all the time, which takes thousands of years to get here, like some kind
of time capsule constantly arriving from the past. I honestly can’t think of anything I’d rather do all day than study that.”
Aubrey’s heart swelled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to question your conviction. At all. Because you can absolutely know what
you want to do at sixteen. I did.”
Paige straightened. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. And astrophysics sounds incredible. I mean, you can do whatever you set your mind to. As in, you, specifically. You seem like a . . . force of nature. So don’t bother with what people say. Just go out and show them they’re wrong. There’s a special kind of satisfaction in that, trust me.”
“Wow. Thanks. You kind of sound like my dad, actually. He’s always like”—Paige squared her shoulders and adopted a mock baritone—“‘Ignore
the haters, Peanut.’ Which is such an old-man way to say it, but I appreciate the message.”
Aubrey chuckled. “He sounds like a good guy.”
“He is. I mean, I’m a daddy’s girl, definitely. But only because he’s a really amazing human.”
A twinge of envy stabbed at Aubrey’s throat. Love saturated this girl’s voice, free of qualifications, a bittersweet echo
of the way she’d felt toward her father at that age.
Back before everything had gotten broken. Before he’d smashed it to smithereens. And afterward, it had stayed broken. A decade
later, he’d lost his battle with hepatic cancer, and that’d been it. A sad story with no ending.
Aubrey cleared her throat. “I’d like to meet this dad of yours. He sounds wonderful.”
“Oh, you will,” Paige chirped, the damper on her demeanor already dissolving. She glanced at her watch. “In about five minutes,
actually. He’s volunteering with us, too. He stopped by the fighting gym this morning, but he said he’d be here by noon.”
A tendril of disquiet unfurled in Aubrey’s stomach. “The fighting gym?”
“Yeah. He’s super into this MMA stuff. It’s so weird, but I’m all for whatever makes him happy, you know? And—Oh, look! Speaking
of!”
Paige jumped up and dashed away. All the blood in Aubrey’s body plummeted toward her feet. It was just a coincidence, had
to be . . .
But no. When she swiveled in her chair, there stood Nick, in jeans and work boots, hugging a daughter whose personality could not have been more diametrically opposed to his than if she’d been designed that way.
Their gazes snared over Paige’s shoulder.
“Well, shit,” Aubrey muttered, her heart doing a slow capsize. “Definitely did not see that one coming.”