Page 119 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

“Yeah,” I say. “She doesn’t want to go.”

“But you had her at your home. She seems so…”

“Perfect?”

Willow leans over the counter, sets her chin on her hands. “Yeah.”

“She’s coming off a bad experience. She’s moving away in a couple of weeks. She just wants to be fuck buddies.” I move to the window and look down. If she crosses the street, I’ll see her down there.

I hear Willow come up behind me after a bit. “But you so want more.”

I so want more.

I headinto work for a blissful Saturday of no people around. Well, it used to be blissful to have no people around.

I pass by the whiteboard and go to the window, look down at all the Saturday people doing their Saturday things. Buying pastries and flowers or whatever.

Flowers, the most useless crop.

Does Lizzie like flowers? What kind would she buy? I twirl my marker, thinking I need to ask her. It would be some outrageous kind. Bright and ruffly and huge. Peonies or something.

And then I realize I’m thinking about flowers instead of formulas, and I go back to the board.

I’d hoped to have dehydrated Vossameer nailed in time for the Locke banquet. I really had hoped to use the occasion to announce it; the foundation would get the publicity bump, and our partnership would be off to a positive start. We could work together to expedite the testing.

It won’t happen now.

The fact that I won’t have the thing solved by the banquet is bad, yet it feels like far less of a disaster than it might have a month ago.

My race for the formula used to be the only thing on the landscape of my life. Now it exists alongside kitchen things and ironic cookies and hotel trysts and long afternoon walks when I should be working. It lives in a world where conflicted emotions can be contained in one simple, fierce word over the phone.

Where beauty is an asymmetrical freckle. Where baby goats play. Where I can wake up and Lizzie is the first thing I see. And I lie there loving everything about her so hard that it wakes her up.

I return to the whiteboard before I think too hard about her leaving, about the very real possibility that I might not be able to prevent it, hard as I might try.

And really, those baby goat videos. The ridiculous way they hop while they’re running. Or more like they pop into the air, mid-run, and it’s so cute, you can’t look away.

The baby goats seem to inspire each other to jump more—one starts doing it, and then the others follow. Each one acts on its own, like individual kernels of popcorn, pop-pop-popping. I think about that for a while, how it’s random, but there’s a certain strange logic to the sequence.

I’m staring at the board, and that’s when I see it—a roundabout way to link the remaining water molecules together to keep a stable compound while still removing enough of them to get the dehydration I need.

It is possible? Is this it?

Heart pounding, I go to my other board and start capturing it, capturing everything, writing as fast as I can.

The ideas pour out. I scribble, feeling like I’m in a trance.

This is it.

The answer is right here. It was there all along. It’s magnificent.

Thirty-Three

Lizzie

“Didyou make microwave popcorn for him yet?” Mia asks as we head under some scaffolding. “You so need to do that before you leave.”

The space to walk is too narrow for going side by side, so we walk single file for half a block, which is just as well, because I don’t want her to see the sadness in my eyes. “We’re not at that point in our fuck buddy relationship,” I say over my shoulder, as breezily as I can.

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