Chapter Twenty

The next day, I stood on the deck next to Dad as Nantucket became a raised line on the horizon. Home, I thought, with a swell of fondness, though of course Nantucket wasn’t home. But it felt like it, after almost two months. Maybe because the island was so small, so easy to know quickly; maybe because natural beauty had a way of burrowing deep inside your heart.

Dad showed me and Ethan how to map the coastline as we circled the island. We sat by the rail, trying to draw the dips of coves, the sweep of cliffs. All too soon, we glided into the harbor, said goodbye to Gary and Brent and the rest, and climbed into cars waiting to take us back to Golden Doors. I felt unexpectedly nostalgic—it had only been three nights, but they’d been good ones.

“Welcome back!” Ethan’s mom said when we arrived. “You’re just in time to help with dinner.”

Ethan looked at me. “Should we go back out for a while?”

“Very funny,” his mom said. “Shira and Noah could use some help on the mango-avocado salad.”

Five minutes later, Ethan was squeezing limes for the vinaigrette and chopping cilantro, and I was peeling mountains of fruit. While I’d loved being on the Salty Fox, I loved this, too: laughing with the Barbanel cousins, listening to the adults chatting in the great room, eating outside as the sun set, breathing in the scent of jasmine and listening to the coo of mourning doves.

I couldn’t believe it’d be August in a few days, and a few weeks after I’d head to UMass. I could barely conceptualize college, despite visiting campus and texting my new roommate and forcing Dad to sit through the tedium of AlcoholEdu with me. I remembered Andrea Darrel’s nerves about going to college. I’d been further from home than she ever had, but still couldn’t imagine leaving home and living in dorms, surrounded by strangers. I still wondered what I should expect.

And what would happen to me and Ethan?

I pushed the worry out of my head. Later. I would deal with that later.

Grace texted around 10:00 p.m. Sent the rest of the paper pictures, sorry to send so late! Just got home from a VERY GOOD DATE with Sierra

Like a legit date

We went out for dinner and then there was a dance party (??) in the street and so we danced

And then we MADE OUT against a MURAL and part of me was in my body but part of me was outside and like “I wish I had a photo of us making out in front of this mural”

That sounds weird now that I type it out

Don’t worry I was fully in the moment

Anyway should I ask her if she wants to be my girlfriend? how does one do such a thing

Before my phone could ping any more, I called Grace. “Yes! You should ask her.”

“What if she says no?” Grace’s face was illuminated only by the twinkle lights around her bed. “What if she’s like, no, you freak, I don’t want to date you seriously?”

“Then she’s the freak. And you’ll know, and won’t waste any more time on her.” My new mantra.

“How very mature,” she said skeptically. “What’s gotten into you?”

A smile tugged at my lips. “Since you ask…”

We talked for ages, until neither of us couldn’t stop yawning. After we hung up, I opened the images she’d sent of Andrea’s diaries.

Andrea was happy. Blissfully, devotedly, ecstatically happy. To be honest, it was a little boring.

It also clearly made her less inclined to journal. For several months she stopped altogether, except for one line in March 1911 saying terrible news about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which I vaguely remembered being a Bad Historical Disaster.

And then—

April 8, 1911

I don’t even know what to write. I think I might cry.

She’d written two lines of numbers below. I tried to make sense of them. She’d scribbled mathematical equations in the margins before, but she’d never written anything so deliberately, as though she had already worked it out elsewhere and was copying it over here in a neat, careful hand—far more careful than her usual—for posterity.

What could make her want to cry?

I flipped the page. I half expected a time-jump, given Andrea’s erratic journaling. Instead, the following entry was dated the next day.

April 9, 1911

How dare he.

I thought we loved each other.

I thought he respected me.

Cold trickled through my body like slivers of ice. I read it again. How dare he.

There were no further pages.

What had happened? Grace had said she’d taken pictures of the rest of the journal available. Had all the journal’s pages been filled, or had Andrea stopped writing in it? Had she censored the pages she gave to Harvard? Or had Harvard censored her?

How dare he.

Who was “he”?

But of course he, to Andrea Darrel, always meant Frederick Gibson. And Gibson had discovered his comet in 1911.

I’d expected Andrea to be envious about her boyfriend discovering a comet, but to be furious…to sound betrayed…How dare he what? How dare he…break up with her? Discover a comet first? Say something cruel?

I wished I could talk this out with someone—and then I realized I could. Ethan was right down the hall. Ethan and I were dating, and I could go to his room if I wanted.

Without letting myself think about it too much, I slipped out of my room and knocked on Ethan’s door. “Hello?” he called, his voice croaky and sleepy. Shoot, I hadn’t even checked the time. After midnight, for sure.

I pushed the door open, then shut it behind me and leaned against it. “Hi.”

He blinked, then sent me a bone-melting smile. “Hi.”

“That is not why I’m here,” I told him, trying not to pay attention to how good his messy hair looked. “Grace sent me more of Andrea Darrel’s diaries.”

“Okay…?”

I sat at the foot of his bed. “The last two entries are weird. Something happened, and I don’t know what—but I think it was about Gibson.” I showed him my phone, flipping between the two entries.

“What are these numbers?” Ethan asked through a yawn, nodding at the string attached to the first entry.

“I don’t know. But—Ethan, when did Gibson discover the comet? Was it—it wasn’t then, was it? It wasn’t April eighth or ninth?”

“Huh?” Ethan rubbed his eyes. One of his curls stood straight up.

“Something big happened, to Andrea. And the next day, she was furious. In 1911, the year of the comet’s discovery. Maybe Gibson dumped her…or said something rude…I’m trying to figure out why she was crying and speechless and furious.”

“I dunno.” Ethan still looked sleepy.

I worried at my lip with my teeth. “I feel like it was about her work, since she said I thought he respected me, and Andrea desperately wanted to be respected for her work. She was so ambitious. But also…” I looked at the first page again.

I don’t even know what to write. I think I might cry.

“Sometimes, you don’t cry out of sadness or fury.” I worked through it out loud. “Sometimes you cry out of joy. Sometimes you’re speechless from awe.” A shiver danced across the base of my neck. “Isn’t it funny? An amateur astronomer discovering a comet, instead of his girlfriend, a professional astronomer, who’s been sweeping the skies for years?”

I raised my gaze to Ethan’s and found him staring straight at me, completely awake now. His eyes widened. “You think…”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she felt a very strong feeling on the eighth, and then she felt betrayed on the ninth. What if…she was speechless from awe? What if this string of numbers…What if the reason she felt betrayed…”

He said the words out loud because one of us needed to. “You think Gibson’s comet—one of the most famous comets out there—wasn’t discovered by Frederick Gibson. You think Andrea Darrel discovered the comet, and Gibson took credit for it.”

The words settled over me, heavy and blunt and real. I couldn’t be sure, of course. But in my gut, the words rang true. “Do you know when, exactly, Gibson discovered the comet?”

“Let me see.” Ethan rolled out of bed—seriously, he rolled over and landed on the floor in a cross-legged position, like a supremely sleepy acrobat. He pulled his laptop toward him, and I sat at his side, my back against his bed, as he tapped away.

He turned toward me and kissed me.

For a moment, I kissed him back, lost in the taste of him, in the feel, in the fact that we were together now, if secretly, and I got to touch him as much as I wanted—

And then I realized we were sliding horizonal. I pushed him up and pointed at his computer. “Ethan! Concentrate!”

“I’m concentrating.” He swept my hair back behind my ear.

“On the wrong thing.”

He groaned. “I can’t believe you’re only using me for my research abilities. Use me for my body, please.”

“Later.”

“Promise?” he asked hopefully.

I jabbed my finger once more at the screen. “Comet!”

He sighed, then continued poking around. The date wasn’t easy to find. Wikipedia only said: “Frederick Gibson discovered Comet C1911d during a routine search for comets.” No further details on timing, just information about the Arborids and the comet’s orbital period. “I’m not seeing it. Did you say people had to file for a discovery? Where?”

“I’m not sure—the local powerhouse astronomy center? Which would probably be Harvard.”

Sure enough, we found a website with serious nineties vibes, declaring that the Harvard College Observatory Bulletins were the Western Hemisphere’s main way of announcing discoveries of comets and novae between 1898 and 1926. They had PDFs of scans of their old bulletins. “There’s one from April ninth, 1911,” I said, my stomach clenching.

We opened it. In bubbly handwriting, like mine at thirteen, it read, “A cablegram received at this observatory from Mr. Frederick Gibson states that a planet has been discovered, positions of which are as follows.” A few lines of numbers followed.

“Planet?” Ethan asked.

I could barely hear him over the pounding in my ears. “That’s how they referred to comets.” I remembered how Andrea had written about Witt’s planet. How she’d longed to discover a comet herself. “Gibson filed for a discovery. The same day Andrea wrote how dare he.”

“But—Jordan, Andrea worked at Harvard, she basically lived at the observatory. If she discovered the comet, how would he have been able to file for it before her? She would’ve had to tell him the positions and everything first, and why would she do that before telling Harvard?”

“I don’t know. But these numbers—look, they match the ones she wrote down in her diary.”

Ethan let out a low whistle. “Looks bad. Though it’s possible, right, they both independently discovered it?”

Like Witt and the other dude. “Yeah,” I admitted reluctantly. “But why would she be so mad if he genuinely found it?”

“Like you said. She’d been trying to do this her whole life. He’d only been interested in astronomy for a few years. I bet it’d still make her furious if he scooped her.”

“True.” But I thought about Rosalind Franklin, who did groundbreaking work on DNA only to watch two men win the Nobel Prize. And Lise Meitner, who didn’t get any credit for nuclear fusion. And the Harvard Computers, called Pickering’s Harem, whose names were below men’s for their own work, or absent. “But this kind of thing happened. A lot.”

“I’m just saying, it could’ve gone down differently.”

Irritation spiked through me. “Why are you trying so hard to defend him?”

“I’m not! I’m trying to make you see we don’t have absolute proof. And I think we need absolute proof before spreading this around too much. I mean, this is a pretty big accusation.”

“Wait.” My eyes narrowed. “Is this about—you?”

He looked confused. “Huh?”

“About your research on Gibson? About the speech you’re giving, the work you’ve done? You think it’d look bad for you if it turned out he was a thief?”

Ethan’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t know! Why else would you care?”

“Because I’m trying to protect your dad,” he half shouted. “The conference we’re presenting at next week? It’s run by the Gibson Foundation, Jordan. Your dad’s trying to get a grant from the Gibsons, and the chair is the great-grandson of Frederick Gibson. You think they’ll like it if you call their founder a liar and a thief?”

“Oh.” I suddenly felt very small. “I didn’t know.”

“Now you do. And it’s what I was trying to tell you, so you could have waited before jumping down my throat.”

I swallowed. “I’m sorry. But—if they knew Gibson was wrong, wouldn’t they want to acknowledge it? It’d be the right thing to do.”

Ethan scoffed. “Because adults have such a great record of doing the right thing. Like cleaning up the environment. And the ocean. And space.”

My stomach sank. Given the choice between the right thing and the easy thing, society had made it very clear what it’d choose. But—“I shouldn’t have to choose between my dad getting a grant and a woman getting credit for her discovery. That’s ridiculous.”

“No,” Ethan said, softening. “We need more proof. Proof they can’t dismiss out of hand.”

“Okay.” I felt a little reassured. “Makes sense. But—Ethan, at some point, we have to tell people. Even if we don’t have proof. We have to at least say what we know.”

“Agreed,” Ethan said. “But maybe we wait until after the conference? I have papers the foundation let me read for my research. We can look though those, see what we turn up. And obviously tell your dad if you want, I just meant you shouldn’t charge up to the Gibson Foundation and accuse them of fraud.”

“Yeah.” I thought about it. “Maybe I won’t even tell Dad until we have a few more facts. I don’t want him to feel like…” I smiled wryly. “I don’t know, like I’m making mountains out of molehills. Like I’m being messy.”

Ethan nodded. Then he closed his laptop, put it aside, and turned to me. “You can trust me, you know. I’m not going to defend a guy who stole work from another scientist.”

“I know.” I bowed my head and stared at my feet.

“And—I know you’re nervous about the two of us. Being together. But I’m on your side. Always.”

I nodded, feeling sick. Why had I yelled at him? Had I ruined things between us immediately? “I’m sorry. I’m bad at this. I guess—I should go now. Give you some space.”

“Jordan.” His voice was gentle. “Do you want to stay?”

I looked back at him.

“It’s your call. But you can. If you want.”

I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “Yeah,” I said. “That sounds nice.”