Epilogue John
TEN YEARS LATER
Ididn’t know I could love anything so much.
I mean, who doesn’t love a toddler with eyeglasses?
He doesn’t really need glasses, but O likes to put these little plastic frames on him when she makes us pose for pictures.
Sometimes she puts bow ties on both of us and makes us hold calculators.
For a brilliant artist, she has a very limited concept of what nerds look like.
Jack Webster Brandt—aka Baby Nerdballs—is fifteen months old. He has soft black hair and hazel eyes. He has his mother’s grace and his father’s ability to drive my wife crazy.
So much has happened since I woke up in my bed that morning and finally told Olivia that I love her. So much, so many little things, so many grand gestures, and so many moments.
We went to the wedding in Santa Barbara together that summer.
After seeing my tech-nerd colleague get married to a statuesque blonde and seeing all of his awkward friends and family and coworkers trying to flirt with the bride’s friends and coworkers and family, Olivia and I came up with the idea for Brainy Hearts.
The matchmaking offshoot of Brainy Biz was an immediate success, and Olivia was, of course, an unofficial consultant.
So, I didn’t go long without investing in a new start-up, but Olivia was involved, and it was important to her that I be the first to market.
I made a big donation to the Bay Area Ballet, and Olivia was a featured dancer that season.
There was never any question that she deserved it based on talent alone.
She might have been given the opportunity that year even if I hadn’t made the donation—but I never would have not made the donation.
I was always going to help her do the thing that she loves.
I did propose to her, formally, at Christmas. When we were staying at her parents’ house. No grand gestures. I got down on one knee in her old bedroom in an attempt to reprogram the memory of her seeing the pitch deck. I think it worked.
The next summer, during her hiatus, we danced to “Beautiful Dreamer” at our small wedding in the Cotswolds. In Merrick’s garden. His granddaughter Ginny performed a ballet piece during the reception, and she was pretty bloody good.
Olivia gave me that handwritten conversation that we’d written to each other on the plane from London to New York, handsomely framed, for our first anniversary.
She spent two years with the Pacific Northwest Ballet because they’d offered her a higher rank and more money.
I bought a house in Seattle, spent most of my time there, and traveled once a month.
She finished out her career with the Bay Area Ballet when they asked her to come back as a principal dancer.
As soon as she danced the lead in Giselle, she retired.
But no one who saw her performance will ever forget it.
By then, she understood that role and the story with every cell of her being.
It was two years ago that she retired, and she immediately got pregnant with Jack, whom she is able to drive around in a minivan because I made her get her license nine years ago.
Jack keeps us both very busy, but I’m advising Olivia on how to form a company that trains retired dancers and finds them jobs and new careers. She knew back when she was seventeen that she’d have a career after she stopped dancing professionally, and she was right.
We’re having a picnic in our backyard and taking pictures. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake drifts out from the speakers inside the house, and I have a full-body chill, remembering the time I was in the audience at the Pittsburgh Ballet and knew with such clarity that I would marry this woman.
The music connects me to all those moments in time, but Olivia connects me to everything in myself and the world.
She is poetry in motion, and I am a brain with a body and a heart and a wife and a baby and so much love. No words or numbers or symbols will ever help me understand how I can feel so much or be so happy. And I don’t need them to. I only need these people to remind me of what’s possible in life.