I laughed while the ladies formed a barrier at the door.
“I know,” Xander said. “I’m sorry to break tradition, but this is vitally important.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not in my dress yet, and that’s the bad-luck part, I think.”
“Yes, that’s the exception to the rule.” Xander sounded mischievous. “Five minutes, that’s all I need.”
The ladies filed out and I tightened my robe around me. Xander was beautifully handsome in his tux, a yellow daffodil in his lapel that matched those in my bouquet.
“What are you up to?” I asked. “This is highly unorthodox.”
“I know but we’re doing this right today, aren’t we? Making up for that terrible ceremony in Providence?”
“It wasn’t all bad,” I said with a smile. “Is now a good time to confess I’ve been calling you my husband in my mind and heart for the past five years?”
His grin softened. “What a coincidence. Because I’ve been calling you my wife since the day I sent that text offering to marry you.”
“Oh, Xander…”
“But back to the matter at hand. That day in Providence, we had nothing. No dress. No real vows. And no ring.”
“Well, it was kind of an emergency—” I gasped as Xander went down on one knee and pulled a small black velvet box from his pocket. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to skip any steps or leave anything undone,” he said, his blue and brown eyes so intent on mine, so full of love. “I want to give you everything you deserve, Emery. And that’s the entire damn world. Because that’s what you’ve given me. You’ve shown me that life is so much more than the facts and the science I built it on. I think I somehow always knew that and that’s why I kept looking to the stars. And then I found you.”
“Xander…” I inhaled a shaky breath.
He opened the box to reveal a round-cut diamond solitaire with five little diamonds surrounding it. A star, glittering in the sunlight.
“Emery, will you marry me…within the next ten to fifteen minutes?”
A joyful laugh burst out of me. “Yes. Yes, Xander, I will marry you. Again. A million times.”
He slipped the ring on my finger, and I kissed him with my entire heart and soul, this man who I’ve loved in a hundred lifetimes.
“You know what I think?” I said. “We meet in all universes, and we get married in every single one.”
Xander smiled, brushing hair from my face. “I think you’re right.”
Xander, Three Years Later
I stood before the whiteboard in one of the many lecture halls at Harvard. One half was covered in equations, the other in my crude rendition of a black hole—a black orb with a ring of light around it, like one of Saturn’s rings—emitting little particles of radiation.
I should’ve hired Emery to draw this for me.
I smiled to myself as three hundred pairs of eyes—my Introduction to Astrophysics class—listened attentively. My “day job” that paid most of the bills while working at my dream job: researching black holes with the Event Horizon Telescope team.
But being surrounded by students who were as eager as me to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos was more rewarding than Ithought possible.
“In 1974, Stephen Hawking offered his groundbreaking theory that reshaped our understanding of black holes. His ‘Hawking radiation’ suggests that black holes are not entirely black; instead, they emit faint radiation near the event horizon, which means black holes are actually decaying or breaking down over time. Lots of time. This leads to an information paradox. Can anyone tell me why?”
Hands went up. I picked a young woman in the front row.
“Because quantum mechanics says that information can’t be destroyed. So if the black hole is breaking down, what happened to everything it sucked in?” she asked. “Where did all that light go?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Where did all the light go?”
I paused, my thoughts going inexplicably to Dean Yearwood. I smiled and was suddenly back in a shell with sunlight glinting off the water, an oar in my hands and my friend sitting in front of me, wearing that grin of his…
