Epilogue
One Year Later
“These figures aren’t right!” whispers the guy beside me, agitated, and without meaning to, I roll my eyes.
Dario is my friend and probably the best student in this statistics class — after me — and sometimes I wonder how, after all these months, he still doubts what we’re doing.
“I’ve already checked them twice. The data is correct.”
I don’t tell him that last night I tested the algorithm five times, against five separate data sets, and every single one produced the same type of results.
“You’re sure?”
“More than sure,” I answer, already slightly irritated.
There was a time when a question like his would have sent me spiraling into anxiety. Not anymore. I work every day at reminding myself that my mind does good work and that this constant doubt only puts a completely absurd kind of pressure on me.
There are days when I manage it, and days that go less well, but the advantage of living with someone who reminds you every single day what a brilliant mind you have is that you start to believe it. At least a little.
For nine months I’ve been living with Silas in a penthouse overlooking the river, with an entire cabinet in the kitchen dedicated to my hot chocolate. We even have a kitten named Chulito.
It took me exactly one minute and fifteen seconds to convince Silas to bring him home the evening we found him in the park near the university. He was dirty and frightened, but what drew me to him was his fur, colored in different shades of brown, gray, and white. He was perfect.
The noise in the classroom reminds me that we need to submit this project, and the professor comes to our laptop to review our results.
“Everything looks excellent,” he says, and before I can stop myself, I’m grinning like an idiot at my classmate. His cortisol levels are probably four times the healthy limit right now.
“Okay, okay, you were right,” Dario tells me once the professor has moved on to another group.
Yes, I was. And it feels damn good.
After we pack up our laptops and are given the material for the exam, I leave campus and head toward the café on the far side of the campus.
In a building covered with red brick, black wooden window frames, and a few garlands of autumn leaves around the door is my second favorite place in this city after our apartment.
When I push the door open, the bell dings, and the first thing that hits me is the smell of gingerbread and wild berries in the air.
I pass through the two rooms to the back, where, in a corner, sits the reason my heart doubles its pace.
Silas is in an armchair, tea in hand, a book thicker than the Bible open on his lap.
His brow is slightly furrowed, and I already know his eyes are darker than usual: the color that deepens in them only when he’s very concentrated on something. Or on me.
I take a step toward him, and right then the floorboard creaks under my feet, pulling his full attention to me.
And I love it when all his attention is on me.
His eyes soften when they find me, but when they travel down to my leather skirt and then back up to my hair wrapped in my usual messy bun, which has come undone even further on the way here, they take on that deep black again.
“Come here, Amalia.”
He doesn’t have to say it twice. I’m already in front of him.
He moves the book to the side table and his hands find my waist, easing me slowly down onto his lap. He smells of tea and musk and something like the air just before a storm, and I love that combination — it suits him so completely.
“I missed you,” I whisper close to his lips.
His nose tucks against the base of my throat, and I want to laugh at this habit of his, burying his face in the skin of my neck because, according to him, I always smell of chocolate and lilac.
His lips find my pulse, and I know I let out an exhale that was a little too audible, judging by the way his hands tighten slightly at my waist.
“I missed you too. How did the project go?”
He stayed up with me last night for three more hours while I checked the algorithm again, bringing me hot chocolate and quietly reassuring me that every step was right.
As head of the Mathematics Department at Boston University, he works twelve-hour days sometimes, but I see how satisfied he is with his faculty and his students, and I can’t help but feel proud.
He still takes on the occasional project for some organization or another, but as long as his safety isn’t at risk, and he has guaranteed me that it isn’t, I don’t object.
“It was perfect,” I answer, and I know the joy in my voice doesn’t escape him.
“As I already knew it would be,” he says, and it will never stop fascinating me, the way he is so certain of my mind when I am not.
When I hold him a little tighter, my thoughts drift to Lupe, to the fact that we haven’t spoken in two days, and to the way I can feel her closing herself off further in the wake of everything that happened over a year ago.
How much I wish she could find someone who would help her move past the shadow Aleksandr left behind, because I know my sister.
Behind every “I’m fine,” every “I’m in a rush,” every “We’ll talk later,” is that fucking snake’s voice in her head.
And there is no program or algorithm that can help me remove it, not until she’s ready to let it go herself.
Ay, sweet Jesus, Mary, and Newton, send someone into her path. Someone she can trust not to break her heart again. Por favor.