She continued talking in soothing sentences, and I assented to everything, not paying attention to a single word. My degree didn't matter at all. What mattered was getting back home. By the time I hung up the phone, I had already become narrowed in my focus. Eliot would think that I was a horrible person for leaving him so abruptly. It was for the best, so I thought. He would have no reason to come after me then. I could leave him to find peace on his own.
Was I the hero of this story, or the villain? As I ran into the street to catch a cab, I thought back to all of the sins I had committed. We'd had to memorize them in Sunday school when I was young. Pride and envy toward Csilla and Mark. Sloth in my studies. Wrath toward the killer who had taken my mother, and now another woman.
The last three—lust, greed, and gluttony—were the sins I committed most of all toward Eliot. I was simultaneously possessive of his attention and unwilling to give him the same attention in return. I had spent the last year on the internship and trying to find my mother's grave. Now I was on another chase through the labyrinth of Budapest's streets for a murderer. Was it any surprise that Eliot no longer wanted my company? He'd found the answer he was looking for in his proof. I wished him nothing but the best, but at the same time I knew that I was not the woman he needed to support him.
And my father had been visiting Nagyi and sending her money. Was it possible that I was on the wrong side of reason here? Could I be mistaken? All my life, I had thought that I needed to escape my family and it would set me free. I was just beginning to realize that I would be the same insecure girl I had always been, the one with a jagged tear in her heart where a mother's hands would have mended it. Eliot had it worse than I did. His scar was on the outside, a mark for people to ogle. Mine at least I could hide from peeping eyes.
Even here in Hungary, a half a world away, I was stuck in my own self. All of the mistakes I had made seemed to point blame directly at me. None of it was coincidence or chance. I had built up my own fate and I deserved every bit of it.
I had forced myself into harder research than I could handle, and I was floundering.
I had rushed into love with Eliot, and I had lost his affection.
I had ignored my grandmother, and now she was dying.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Eliot
Eliot stood outside of the conference room, shuffling his papers. The board was already fifteen minutes late to conclude their previous meeting, and Eliot's nerves were beginning to get to him. He'd been sitting on the bench outside the room, but now he paced back and forth, looking through the proof that he was supposed to explain to the board.
A gnawing in his stomach brought him back to the time when he was an undergraduate and had to present in front of his class. He'd never been fond of getting up in front of an audience to present his work. Fortunately, his previous mathematical results had been so important, nobody had pressed him for answers. The math spoke for itself. He'd gotten offers, of course, to lecture at prestigious universities and give talks at mathematical conferences. These he declined politely, and everyone assumed that he was one of those mathematicians who preferred isolation to fame. That was one nice thing about math - nobody expected you to love the limelight.
But now he had been forced into a position where he must defend his work. As much as Eliot knew that his recent discoveries would excite the board, he was not sufficiently prepared to answer questions about the proof. He'd just finished it, for one, and there might be holes, places to patch up the work, corollaries that did not work directly. He'd done his best, but he hadn't had time to pick over the proof with a fine-toothed comb, looking for errors. And why were they making him wait?
His phone rang. He jerked back, fumbling in his pocket to turn off the sound. A careless blunder—what if it had rung during the presentation? He looked at the screen and paused.
Brynn.
His eyes darted to the door of the conference room, then back to the screen. He answered.
"Brynn," he said, "I'm just about—"
"She's dying."
Eliot sat down slowly on the bench, putting his papers to the side.
"Your grandmother?"
"She's dying. They say she only has a day or two left." Brynn's voice sounded strained, tiny.
"Brynn, I—"
The door to the conference room opened and a man with gray hair and glasses leaned out, looking at Eliot.
"Dr. Herceg?" he said. "We're ready for you."
"Just one moment," Eliot said, the phone pressed to his ear and away from his face.
"Are you presenting?" Brynn asked.
"Not yet," Eliot said.
"Dr. Herceg," the man said, a frown creasing his face, "We need to start. We're already behind schedule—"
"One moment," Eliot repeated. "This is important."
"I'll call back," Brynn said.
"No," Eliot said. "It's okay—"
"I don't want to interrupt," Brynn said. "We can talk later."
Eliot slumped back against the wall.
"Alright," he said quietly. "Do whatever you need to do. I'll call you after the presentation. It shouldn't be too long. Brynn, I'm sorry."
"Dr. Herceg, the board is waiting—"
"I'm so sorry, Brynn. I'm sorry."
"I'll talk to you later," Brynn said, and hung up. Eliot stared at the phone in his hand. He hadn't told her he loved her. Perhaps he should call her back.
"Dr. Herceg!"
"Yes, yes!" Eliot couldn't keep the irritation out of his voice as he stuffed the phone in his pocket and picked up his stack of papers. The man looked severely put out, but Eliot didn't care. As he moved to the front of the room, he noticed that all of his anxiety had disappeared. The board members looked up at him expectantly. They looked like copies of each other—elderly men, some gray, some balding, all in drab suits and ties cinched around their necks. He had dressed the same way, in a fitted charcoal suit and dark tie. Now he looked around and wondered if he was destined to the same fate as all of these men.
"Dr. Herceg, thank you for coming here today," the gray-haired man said, settling back into his chair and picking up a printed copy of what looked to be the paper Eliot had given to the director. "Your previous work in mathematics has been admirable, and I hope that we can continue to expect great things of you in the future. We have all been given copies of your current paper—"
"That's out of date," Eliot said. The man looked up, evidently shocked to have been interrupted.
"Out of date?" another board member asked.
"If you turn to the last page, you will see the theorem that I have been working on for the past year. I have since proved it."
"Did you send this out to the board before this presentation?" the gray-haired man in the middle asked. "I did not receive anything, I think, in my email." He smiled a smile of pity at Eliot.
"I have not yet typed up the proof," Eliot said. "But it is finished. I can walk you through it."
"We will start first with our comments on the original paper," the head of the board said. He coughed.
"Wait," the man in the middle said. "You proved this?" He bent his head over the conclusion of Eliot's proof. "But you're using too many variables—"
"Yes," Eliot said. "But go back a step and see; it's twice generalized."
"In your original paper, you say that such a proof is impossible!" The head board member stood up, his fingers spread on the table and damp with perspiration. "You were working on a few base cases and had already solved the simpler ones."
"As I said, the paper is outdated."
"I move to spend two hours looking over this new proof," the man in the middle said. "I need some time to look through this."
"Of course," Eliot said, bowing.
"Seconded," another man said. "All in favor?"
"Wait," the head of the board said. "Wait," amid a chorus of "Ay!"
"Motion passed. Two hours. That's all, Alex."
The head of the board looked lost and could not look Eliot in the eye.
Eliot rushed out of the board meeting room. Digging through his pocket for his phone, he ignored the stares from people around him on the steps. Yes, a Herceg. The convicted one. Let them stare.
The words on the screen meant nothing to him until the second time he read them, squinting against the harsh sunlight. It was a message from Brynn.
I'm going home.
He called but her phone was off. Then the tone sounded, high-pitched and whining in his ear, and he could not think of what to say to her that he had not already said. So he hung up.
Where was she? Going home?
He glanced at the time on his phone. He still had nearly two hours. That was plenty of time, if he could catch her. He would catch her. He had to.
Eliot pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the airport.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Brynn
“‘One day,’ you said to me, ‘I saw the sunset forty-four times!’
And a little later you added:
‘You know— one loves the sunset, when one is so sad...’
‘Were you so sad, then?,’ I asked, ‘on the day of the forty-four sunsets?’
But the little prince made no reply.”
Antoine de St Exupery
I texted Eliot from the cab to the airport. I wasn't sure if I should wait for him to tell me whether or not it was okay to take his private jet. Well, I suppose technically it was his brother's private jet, but I wasn't about to ask Otto for any favors. The voice of my Nagyi permeated my memories, filled my heart with a vibrant anger.
Angry at whom? That was a question I was unwilling to answer.
"Please, Louis," I said. "I need to get back home."
I was standing on the tarmac of the last terminal, next to Otto's jet. It looked a lot smaller than I remembered now that it was in broad daylight. Louis, one of the co-pilots, waved his hands in the air.
"I can't!" he said, his Cockney dialect undulating the words. "I'm so sorry, Brynn. I have a full load of businessmen headed toward Paris."
"That's fine," I said quickly. "We can go to New York from there, then California."
The sky overhead had turned dark, and now a light sprinkling of rain fell. I raised one hand over my head to keep the drops from falling in my eyes.
"New York? This bird is supposed to land in Prague tomorrow."
"Then you'll still have time for New York. I'll find my own way from New York to California," I said. I'm not sure whether it was the news of my Nagyi in the hospital or my fear that Eliot might come after me that gave me such confidence. Before, I would have called it brash. Now, it was only what was necessary. I suppose that's true of any villain.
"I'll have to talk with Lori about it," Louis said. "She's going to be late. She's never late."
"And I'm—aherm!— not late now," Lori said. Louis and I turned to see the woman bundled up in a scarf. She hacked again and paused, her breathing slightly audible through her nose. "You can't be late if you've cancelled, and I'm calling in sick. But oh dear, AM I sick. Is this the girl? Is this Brynn again?"