“I wish it were that simple,” he answered.

“Tell me how it’s not.”

“He showed me his work,” Jonas confessed. “Over the years, as he was wrestling with the project, Victor would occasionally ask me to look over his equations.”

“So?”

“So . . . how do I know some of his ideas didn’t influence my own? Even on a subliminal level.”

“You don’t,” she responded simply. “But you told me you tried to get him to look at your work, didn’t you?”

“That’s right,” Jonas answered, with no idea of what point Amanda was trying to make.

“And why’d you do that?”

“Because I’d hoped he’d want to work on it with me. Together.”

Amanda’s hand swept the air. “Exactly.”

“What’s your point?” Jonas’s fatigue was almost all-consuming.

“My point is . . . these aren’t the actions of a thief. If your intention really was to plagiarize”—she leaned hard on the word—“you wouldn’t have invited Victor to join in.”

Jonas acknowledged the truth of that with a halfhearted shrug.

“Trust me,” she implored him. “No one understands plagiarism as well as an artist. I might not be able to appreciate the nuances of parallel worlds or quantum theory, but I’m pretty confident in my ability to recognize theft.” Jonas flashed her a skeptical look. “And I know the man I fell in love with. I know his soul.” She reached out and touched the center of his chest.

Jonas took her hand in his. “In any case, I’m out of a job.”

“Any university would be lucky to have you,” Amanda said. New thoughts ignited her. “We’ll move. There’s no law that says I can only paint Manhattan. We can go anywhere—” She was already imagining new places, new opportunities, new homes, but she found herself stopping short. Jonas had a look she’d never seen before, and it frightened her. Sickened her. She could feel the blood drain from her face. “What?”

“No one is going to hire me,” he answered. As before, there was no emotion behind his words. He might as well have been back in the lab, reading off the measurements taken by some instrument or coldly reporting the result of a calculation.

“I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” she heard herself stammer. Her fear was transforming into dread.

“He’s already salted the earth,” Jonas said with an impotent shrug. “His word against mine. Paper covers rock.”

“I still don’t understand, Jonas.”

“He can keep people from hiring me. It’s like he said back at our apartment, he can keep me from ever getting another job.” He shook his head, emotion finally seeping into his voice. It wasn’t anger or sadness but disbelief. “He was in there . . . bragging about it.” Jonas’s face contorted. “It’s all over for me.”

Amanda shook her head in defiance. “No.” She bit at the air, the word manifesting as a puff of white. “Your research . . .”

“I haven’t even finished it.” He let out half a laugh, a mixture of incredulity and bitterness. “The TA who told Victor what I’m working on . . . she made it sound like I was close to finishing. But I’m not. Not really. Not even close.”

“So get close.”

“What?”

“Finish. Now you’ve got the time.”

“But not the reason,” he answered, his voice laced with despair. “I don’t really see the point of going forward.”

“Why not? Something compelled you to start down this path. I think you were inspired. It’s really no different than when I begin a painting.”

Jonas grimaced and wagged his fingers. “Not exactly. You have a dealer. You have a gallery. There’s an outlet for your paintings.”

“That hasn’t always been true.”

“My point is that an academic paper is meaningless—literally meaningless—if other scientists don’t read it.” He sighed. “And no one will publish me.”

“They will.” Amanda’s voice was steel. “Because you are going to finish. Because you’re compelled to. You’re going to finish, and it will be brilliant. Because you’re brilliant. That’s not—look at me. That’s not anything anyone can take away from you. Not ever.”

His lips bent to a thin smile. She knew him well enough to know that he was considering it, working the problem. “I’m unemployable, with no savings to speak of. To be honest, I’m pretty close to broke.”

“I’m an artist. Broke is our default.” She punctuated this with her best wink.

He looked at her with disbelief. “Anyone else would run away.”

Amanda gripped the sides of his head and drilled her eyes into his. “I’m not going anywhere.” It felt like the most important thing she’d ever said to the most important person in her life at the most important moment in her life. “I’m not going anywhere,” she reiterated.

She waited for his reaction, and it was worth it. Slowly, at the speed of a sunrise, Jonas began to smile. Starlight bounced off the edges of his eyes, slick with tears. Their lives really were entwined, and she would never let him give up on his gifts.

They sat together on the bench, their fingers woven. Overhead, the stars blinked down on them in silence.

NOW

Eva Stamper’s office at Von Braun University is a thirty-five-minute commute from her flat on a good day. On a bad day, when the city’s overtaxed subway system strains under the burden of its outdated infrastructure, it’s a fifty-five-minute trek. Nearly an hour. Today is a bad day. And so Eva is in a mood. She could have used that time to work on her presentation this morning. She would have awakened earlier but for the fact she’d been working on that same presentation until three in the morning.

She stomps toward Heisenberg Hall, wishing she hadn’t tried to save a few minutes by foregoing her morning coffee. The building is locked. She’s the first one at work. Typical. As she works to fish her keys from her purse, she notices a homeless man curled up atop the heating vent. A rare occurrence but not unheard of.

“This isn’t a hotel,” she admonishes. “If the University Guard sees you, they’ll throw you in prison.”

The bum stirs and turns over, revealing a face marked by bruises and coated with stubble. His clothes look like they’ve been through a war, and his hair is a rat’s nest. As he stands, he appears astonished.

“Eva,” he breathes.

To hear her name from this stranger’s lips is unnerving. Eva feels herself pale. “Do I know you?”

“I suppose that would all depend on your definition of ‘know.’” She stares back, not knowing what to say. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “Inside joke.” She’s unnerved by the way he stares at her as though they’re friends. But the man is a stranger. “Would you give me five minutes of your time?” he asks.

“And why would I do that?” She says it like a dare.

The man answers by pulling up his left sleeve to expose a line of equations running down his inner forearm. “These formulae,” he ventures. “I’m willing to bet you’ve seen a piece of this somewhere before. In college.”

Eva feels a flush of panic. Who is this stranger? How does he know what she learned in college?

“You studied physics,” he says with surprising urgency. “You thought about changing disciplines. To psychology. But here, in this world, you didn’t. Here, you became a physicist.”