“Ask your mother about it,” said Irene.

“I did ask her,” said George. “You were there. She said a bunch of crap that doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t you get it?” Irene said. “They were friends. They planned the whole thing, George. Your mother and mine. All those little things you thought were fate? No. Plants. They plotted and organized it. All those things my mother said to you, you thought she was reading from the stars? No. She knew you when you were a baby. Probably if she hadn’t been so wasted by alcohol and you hadn’t been so tipsy and heartbroken, you would have remembered her, too. But whatever. You’re right; it actually doesn’t matter. We’ve been played.”

“I don’t care,” said George. “It’s not important. It doesn’t change anything.”

Irene let out a dry laugh. “It changes everything. Whatever we thought was happening wasn’t happening. The Yeats poem? They decided when we’d both memorize it. You went to Thailand on vacation—my grandmother lived in Thailand for years. Kismet? No. Thoughtful planning. Joke’s on us. You’re right—it never mattered.”

“Stop saying that. You’re being wrongheaded,” said George.

“You’re wrongheaded!” she yelled. “I’m the one that got made for you, like some custom pair of pants or a sauce recipe. I’m the one that got born for you. You can’t possibly understand what that feels like.”

“I’m sorry!” said George. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“You can say that because it’s not the same for you. I didn’t get to choose what I wanted to do. I always had to do what would make me better for you, because my mother was so committed to this—these lies—she wouldn’t stop. I never got to choose! Anything!”

He sat there behind a pile of student papers. He was wearing his reading glasses and looked utterly adorable. But for all Irene knew, she had had the idea planted in her head when she was a toddler that tall guys with brown hair and pink cheeks and reading glasses were proper mating potential. She had it planted in her head, and then she had her head discarded by the people that planted it, before they even harvested the idea. Here it was, come to fruition, and she had nothing to do with it. She only wanted to retreat. Retreat, retreat, retreat, before there was more embarrassment and more grief.

That morning she’d hired a real estate agent to list her mother’s house, and she’d hired a Dumpster company to come and park a big one in the driveway. She would empty out the house. Maybe Kate and Belion would help her. Then she would move to Bowling Green and commute. She would see George at work sometimes, maybe, but the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was a big place. She wouldn’t run into him that often, and when she did she would be professional. She would see him married to someone else, someone he could pick in the usual way, where you look around and notice someone you like, and you don’t get all hectic, throwing the word “love” around right away like a crazy person. She would work tirelessly at the Euphrates Project. She would finish setting up the experiment. If once in a while on her way home over the Anthony Wayne Bridge she stopped her car and got out, wavered a little on the edge of the river, no one would blame her for touching the railing. And when the project was up and running and the beams were firing, the detectors detecting, she would let herself fall forward, smack into the water, crush into a broken thing. Maybe they would name a particle after her. The George’s Constructed Wife particle. How glorious.

What she knew, what she knew with utter clarity, was that if she could not have George, she could not continue. She could not go through life whizzing through a pipe unhindered, endlessly whizzing and whizzing, a proton in a circuit, a hamster in a wheel, with no one to intersect, nothing to stop her. She would stop, meeting water, meeting concrete, meeting whatever would break her apart into whatever particles were no longer recognizable as her.

“You won’t do this,” said George. “You won’t leave me. You think you will, but you won’t.”

Irene bridled at this. She almost told him to go to hell. But then she felt sorry for George, too. It wasn’t just her who’d been duped. Poor man, he’d bought the long, sick story even before she had.

“You don’t know me, George. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“I do know you,” he said. “I recognize every part of you. I knew you when I first saw you, before we figured out about all these stupid intersections they planned. I knew you when I first saw you in the banquet hall. Just because our mothers did some stupid crap back in the eighties. Come on. Two people meet and fall in love. Then they’re happy forever. That’s the story. That’s the whole story.”

“That story is not real!” she screamed at him.

“What in the time we’ve known each other has not been real? What about me is not real? What about you?

“Forget all the schemes and the intersections, all these little coincidences they planned. They also made us, on some deep and basic place, to work together. You’re the lover, I’m the fighter, you’re the believer, I’m the pragmatist, you’re the heart, I’m the head. They built that. We can’t ignore it—it’s who we are.

“Then let’s not ignore it. Maybe that is love.”

“Of course you still believe that stupid crap! It’s you that believed it this whole time! You’re the believer, George, right? And I’m the scientist. We fit together like a puzzle! Except now, surprise! The thing you believe in so much means that our big fancy ‘true love’ romance story is bullshit, just a bunch of planted ideas, manipulation, hypnosis, whatever!”

“Irene, what if it’s even lower than that, even deeper, beneath all that stuff? We’re not the believer and the scientist. We’re not the folk music and the travel and the birthday. We’re two people who are loyal, and ambitious, and honest, and we both are scientists—hello? We both are believers—don’t deny it. The girl who believed she could create a black hole in a lab? The guy who documents the location of distant stars—with actual math, thank you very much. We aren’t puzzle pieces. We are actually the same.”

She listened to him, her breath coming hard. He must feel such a fool, having sat with her mother, her drunk and devious mother, listening to a ridiculous prophecy of a girl with brown hair, astronomer, dreams, and nonsense, who was really hardly worth the use of a pregnancy test. How long had the mothers’ plot survived, even six years? And then it fizzled. They were too crazy. They were too drunk. Or somebody changed her mind, and somebody else was too drunk to argue.

“Why are you trying to ruin everything? Why can’t you just be happy?” He sounded so sad. She felt so sorry. She wanted to fix it. But how could she?

“I don’t even know what happiness is,” said Irene.

“I do,” said George.

She should have let her mother burn their house down with both of them in it. She should have taken a deep, cleansing breath of the smoke and rolled over in her bed to pass out and expire right there. Then George would be with Kate Oakenshield right now. Or George would be with Sam Beth. And Sam Beth would take care of him properly. She, Daughter of Babylon, would know what to do with George. She was an astronomer, a brunette, and a dreamer in the most literal sense of the word.

“You don’t belong with me,” said Irene.

“You’re not in your right mind,” said George. He carefully made a mark on one of the papers in front of him and set it off to the left.

“Maybe you belong with Sam Beth,” said Irene.

“Who?” said George. “Patrice?”

Irene began to move distractedly between the pieces of his universe model. She touched a galaxy with her left hand, a galaxy with her right hand. She stepped carefully around a single star, though she had no idea what it was doing out all on its own. She had seen George’s calculations, his attempts at solving for a plane of symmetry in the universe, his attempts to fold it back on itself across a single plane and find that each half had a match on the other side. She felt the magnetism in his body, felt it pulling on her, making her try to find his words sensible, convincing. She felt she could almost let go, just nod, smile. She had to fight.

“Now you’re being crazy,” said George.

“No, you’re being blind. Maybe Patrice really loves you,” said Irene. “Just by chance. Real love. Not by design.”

“You love me,” said George.

“No, I don’t.” Irene corrected him sharply. “George. It’s not how we thought. I am conditioned to feel something for you, but it’s not love. It’s training. Maybe Sam Beth loves you for real. Reach out to her. Why not? She’s smart, and she believes in you.”

“So do you,” said George.

“I believe in nothing. No, correction,” she added. “You’re right. I believe in my experiment. Which is the only thing that’s ever been what it’s supposed to be. That’s what I believe in. Observe. Collect data. Record that data. Make conclusions dependent on the data and nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.”

George shook his head. “I’m not going to fall in love with Sam Beth just because you tell me to,” he said. He smiled and she felt her heart lurch. She could just say OK. She could just laugh and forget the rest. But then, but then, there was still the fact of who her father was, who her mother was, who she was. She couldn’t just laugh and forget that.

“At least give her a try. You’d be stupid not to.”

“Not stupid, just happy,” said George.

“Don’t embarrass yourself,” Irene admonished him. “You embarrass yourself and you embarrass me. Don’t you understand that we’re fools? We’re tricked. We’re misled. You’re gold and I’m dross. You’re teak and I’m fire. The fact that you don’t know that is an embarrassment to both of us. It was a trick, George. It is. A trick.”

“It doesn’t matter what it was or what it is. It only matters what it does.”

“This is what it does,” said Irene. “This is how it ends.”

“No, it’s not!” He slammed his hand down on the desk and glared at her, eyes full of fire. “You think you know yourself, but you don’t. I know you. I see you.”

“No, you don’t!” she screamed back at him, suddenly ferocious. “You see nothing. I am just the ruins of their plan. I am the hopeless residue of everything that they did wrong, George. I’m not worthy to be yours, and if you weren’t brainwashed by them to want me, you would see it. I can’t drink, because I’m too scared of falling down drunk. I can’t have sex—I am too scared of falling in love. I stand on bridges, stand there and stand there, scared to death of falling. I can’t even fall asleep without controlling my dreams. Dreamer? Oh, yes I am. I’m falling, falling, falling all the time. I’m half an inch from suicide, whichever way I turn.”

“You adorable idiot,” said George, now quieter. “Is that what you think?” He stood up from his desk and came toward her, but she held her hand up for him to stay away, and he stopped.

“You’ve had sex, if you didn’t notice. You’ve fallen in love. Done.”

Irene said nothing. Her jaw worked back and forth.

“You think you stand on bridges because you are afraid to die? Baby, you’re the least afraid to die of anyone I have ever known, and the place you stand up on that bridge, that’s the place where you should know that more than any other time. Suicide? Hell, no. That bridge is where you know your impulse is to live. Walking around in our normal lives, on sidewalks, on floors, on the ground, we don’t have to make that decision to live or die. But on the bridge, you’re making that decision: LIVE. With your whole body. That’s where you show how strong you are, Irene. I get that the bridge is where you meet your demon, yes, but that’s why you go there, to kick its ass.”

Irene was breathing heavily. She said, “Well, I’m still afraid to drink.”

“Drink or don’t drink,” he said. “I promise you, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

She leaned against the door frame, trying to think about everything he had just said.

“My head hurts,” said George. “I just want things to go back to how they were.”

But Irene turned and walked away.

* * *

When she had gone, George felt sick. He believed that she would come back. But he would miss her in the interim.

He picked up his phone and used a remote to switch off the light in the room. Instantly, his head felt better, and he felt less worried about encroaching visitations. He felt his way over to the middle of the room and lay down on the cool concrete floor in the center of his universe model. He looked up through the pieces of his model and saw nothing. One benefit to being in the basement: total darkness. He swiped a finger across his phone and dialed his mother, the bright screen lighting up his face and the poles right around his body.