Emery gave me a look. “What do you think?”
“When I think about the motion of a wave, this is what I see,” I said, tapping the equation. Then I pointed at her collage, where the lake’s small wave crashed on the icy shore. “This is what you see.”
Emery looked to the beauty of the wave, then to me, confused, but I was already scribbling.
T(t)=Ts+(T0−Ts)e−kt
“This is Newton’s Law of Cooling,” I said. “It’s what I see when I consider water turning to ice.” I indicated her collage’s frozen waterfall. “This is what you see. This is what youcreate.”
“Xander…”
I wrote another equation. T=2π√L/g
“This is a sinusoidal function for one swing of a pendulum.” I tapped my equation and then her grandfather clock. “This is yours.”
She looked to me, stunned to be hearing what someone should have been telling her her whole life.
“You have something I will never have, Emery,” I said. “You have the ability to see through the building blocks of something—the matter and the particles and the unbending calculus of it all—to its heart.” I turned to her delicate rendering of the cherry blossom tree. “I can model the branching structures of trees with fractal geometry, but I could never make one come alive on a plain white wall. There is nothing simple about you, Emery. Not one thing.”
I looked back to see her eyes were full. She swallowed, and the motion loosened a tear from her lash. It spilled down her cheek.
“Thank you, Xander,” she whispered.
For once in my life, I acted without thinking. I reached out my hand and cupped her cheek. It fit so easily there, as if I were made tohold her. My thumb swept across her soft, warm skin, taking the tear with it. Absorbing it into me, like I wanted to do with everything that hurt her.
Because we’re entangled.
Emery swallowed hard and pressed herself into my touch. Her eyes, still shining, dropped to my mouth for the shortest of seconds and her own lips parted. My heart pounded against my ribs, as if it were about to be set free, and for one short moment, I allowed myself to believe I could have this. This beautiful, perfect girl I’d wanted since I was ten years old.
I inclined my head toward her, a gravitational pull I was helpless to resist. Emery’s chin tilted up ever so slightly, her breath warm and sweet on my lips…
“What are you doing?” came a voice from the door.
The words pelted us like bullets. Emery and I jumped up with comical sameness, and stepped apart from each other, our faces wearing identical flushes, our eyes wide with the same shock.
“Daddy…” Emery stammered, breathing hard. “You’re home early.”
A man stood in the doorway of her room—a door he’d opened without knocking. I’d pictured Emery’s father as a golem—a giant, petrified statue of a man, with no blood in his veins. Instead, Grayson Wallace was slight, shorter than me, and balding. He wore slacks, a white button-down, and a cardigan. Plain. Bland. In a crowd, my gaze would pass right over him. But his eyes…his eyes were like chips of ice, and I suddenly felt as cold as the scene in Emery’s collage.
“Daddy, this is Xander,” Emery said with forced cheer. “My…um, tutor.”
“Nice to meet you, sir.”
Her father’s gaze sized me up and down, from my old shoes to the worn-out sweater I wore over my worn-out T-shirt. I was examined, analyzed, and rejected, all in an instant.
“Xander Ford,” he said. “Your father is Russell Ford.”
“Yes,” I said, muscles tensing all over my body.
“His father is a famous physicist,” Emery said. “In fact, he—”
“Hush up, Emery,” Grayson Wallace said calmly, not looking at her. “Russell Ford’s laboratory work paved the way for new methods of detecting pollutants in large bodies of water.”
I tilted my chin. “Yes, it did.”
“The ramifications of which cost me twenty million dollars in regulatory fines last year.”
“Daddy…”
