George could see that she was crying. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it about the accident?”
Sara shook her head.
He began to panic. “Did Jacob say something to you?”
She sobbed. “Irene went back to the doctor.”
George shushed her gently. “It’s going to be nothing. She’s young. She’s practically a vegan. She’s basically Wonder Woman. Don’t worry.”
But Sara would worry; George knew that. In fact he loved it when she worried about things, because it made him confident for the both of them. That was the best part of love, he thought. Better than sex or not waking up alone or cooking without having to halve all the ingredients. Sara made him braver, and George made her calmer. Vicarious. That was what love could do. This was the reason he wished he’d thought of, before.
A few light nudges with his nose made Sara turn up and close her eyes to kiss him. The snow was really picking up now. Sleepily, they watched the flakes dancing down across the street into the rising steam above St. Bartholomew’s and all across Midtown. Down it came, over the Village and the Bronx, blowing across both dark rivers and along the whole of Long Island. Piling high on the steel guardrails and concrete medians, and the roads that ran through the city and out in all directions.
George knew the time had come. Ring or no ring, this was his moment, and it would never be quite like this again. He loved this woman, and he knew he would never stop loving her — first, better, always, most. He could see Sara’s heart pounding. Somehow she always knew what he was about to say.
FIVE IN A MILLION
1
On Tuesday, George Murphy arrived at the office to discover that his star was on the verge of collapse. Perhaps in some metaphorical way, but also actually—237 Lyrae V, a prestellar core in the Ring Nebula that George had been studying for the past four years was experiencing a highly unexpected gravitational collapse. This, at least, according to the note he’d found on his desk that morning from Allen Ling, his cubicle mate at the astrophysics department of Brookhaven University. He had scrawled “She’s gonna blow!” at the top of a spreadsheet whose rows and columns — much to George’s annoyance — did appear to delineate the variations in temperature and density that might characterize the beginning of a collapse.
Not looking up, George said, “You are a delight to work with.”
Allen, who was on the phone with someone at the European Space Agency, paused from speaking rapid-fire Spanish just long enough to flip George the bird and spin toward his computer, where he was seriously bungling a game of Snood.
George felt it all slipping fast away. All throughout his two-hour commute on the icy LIE, he’d been thinking of exactly how to tell his coworkers that he had finally proposed to Sara. Fatherly Dr. Cokonis had certainly been asking long enough when he would finally “make an honest woman out of her” or, as Allen preferred, “put some bling on that shit.” But now this would be the main business of the day — hell, if not the month. George’s doctoral and now postdoctoral research centered on what were called prestellar cores, essentially huge clusters of cosmic gases that sometimes collapsed into young protostars. Allen had been predicting this fate for 237 Lyrae V all year, despite George’s lovingly constructed models that suggested the contrary.
Privately, George imagined himself as a sort of astronomical Darwin, creating algorithms that could hypothetically be used to better predict the stellar landscape millennia from now. The earliest results had led him to identify dozens of cores that were on the verge of becoming stars — but discouragingly, none of them yet had. His formulas had also revealed several highly stable cores, like 237 Lyrae V, in the Ring Nebula, which were statistically unlikely to ever reach T Tauri status, with orbiting planetary bodies and asteroid belts and all the rest. It was these predictions on which his entire project was based, but if Allen was right, it was all about to be disproven on a grand scale.
It took George a half hour to confirm Allen’s data, and another hour to rerun the numbers through a series of algorithms on the computer, which spat out even more numbers, which then had to be rechecked. None of them looked hopeful. George simply willed it not to be true, and after another hour he could think of nothing to do but call Sara. As he dialed, he anticipated the relief he’d feel in complaining about this devastating development — but as her phone rang, he hesitated. He didn’t particularly relish the idea of Allen overhearing such a breakdown, and he didn’t see how he could ruin Sara’s day with worrying. She’d been so excited to tell everyone at the Journal about the proposal—
“Hey, you!” her voice came on the line.
“Hey, yourself,” George said, more smoothly and cheerily than he felt by a mile.
In the background he could hear the busy hum of Bistro 19, one of their group’s go-to spots. Sara was cutting out of work early to have lunch with Irene to keep her mind off the fact that the doctor might call with the biopsy results. According to Irene, they had said they’d know something “later next week,” which made George think there’d be no word until Thursday or Friday, or else they’d have said We’ll call first thing. But he knew it was important to Sara, even if not to Irene, to be the sort of friend who insisted on having lunch with you when the doctor was probably not going to call.
George cleared his throat. “So, some stuff came up over the weekend. I’ll have to stay late tonight to get it straightened out.”
He could hear her disappointment as she said, “But Irene got us all tickets to see The Death of Eurydice tonight.”
“Oh, right. Well, the thing is that one of the most important prestellar cores in my research is undergoing some pretty surprising shifts.”
“Sweetie, your star will still be shifting tomorrow. It’s not like you can stop it.”
George wanted to argue, but at the same time he realized that she was right — if the prestellar core really was collapsing, that really meant it had already collapsed, more than two thousand years ago, because all the information they were collecting right now had actually been traveling at light speed across space for two millennia, and so whatever was happening was all over and done already, one way or the other… but that didn’t change the fact that his research, here and now, might all be a complete and total waste of time. Four years of his life shot — a blink in the existence of 237 Lyrae V, but a long time to him, especially at the start of his career—
Sara broke in on his long silence. “Fine, I’ll see if William can take your ticket then.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
“Good. And see if you can find out what happened with him and Irene on Friday.”
“I can’t ask him that.” A pause and then, “Though I might ask her if she ever shows up.”
“There you go. You’re a reporter. Do some digging!”
“I’m an editor. I edit other people’s reporting. If you can call it that.”
“Just a joke,” he said. There was a long sigh. “Everyone’s really excited about our big news,” George lied, his voice low so Allen wouldn’t hear.
Then a happy noise. “Here too! I’m already making up a guest list. You should get the home addresses of anyone you want to invite from the department.”