Page 97 of Unfaithful

I lift the old cardboard box and study it, looking for a clue. On its side, in blue marker, is written:$2 the lot.

I vaguely remember when I moved out of home to go to college, my mother had a yard sale of all the things I was leaving behind, including my textbooks. She could’ve written this. This could well be her handwriting. This box would have contained my math books too; she would have packed the whole lot together. How it came to be in Alex’s possession, I don’t think I’ll ever know.

I go through each notebook again, one by one, and I am shocked at how far I had come to solve the Pentti-Stone. But I remember distinctly showing these to my mother, my heart quickening with anticipation and her shaking her head: “No, Anna. That’s not right. Try again.”

But itwasright. How could she not see it? Did she deny it on purpose, because she didn’t want to live up to her end of the bargain?If you solve the Pentti-Stone then you can go and play.She never believed I could solve it. She never bothered to check my work. She just slashed the pen across the page with barely a glance.No, that’s not right, try harder.

And how could I not remember these? Is this what trauma does? Makes you block things out? I remember nothing that is in these notebooks other than the pain and the frustration they still evoke now. The moment my mother released me from working on the Pentti-Stone conjecture, I banished the content from my mind but I could not forget the anger, the sadness, and I never wanted to think of it again, until Alex brought it up, and then I had to.

I’d come so close. As close as Alex was when he showed me his own drafts. Which makes sense, since they were mine. I remember him coming to the university—because of me, he’d said. He’d read a paper I’d published, a perfectly ordinary paper on Brownian motion, a topic completely unrelated to the Pentti-Stone.

“I must do my thesis here! With you!” he’d said. Of course he had. He already knew he was going to tackle the Pentti-Stone when he came to Locke Weidman. He was smart enough to know what these notebooks contained: the solution, except for one missing piece. He must have come to the conclusion he couldn’t finish it alone, so he tracked me down. And irony of ironies, I finished it for him. I came up with the last piece of the puzzle. I called him in the middle of the night.What if…?Then I let him take all the credit because I’d only contributed that tiny morsel, believing he’d done everything else.

He hadn’t. I had. And after that, I was no longer needed.

I’ve changed my mind…

I go through them again, slowly this time. Then I open the last notebook to the last page of equations. There are still blank pages, untouched, at the back of that notebook, and I grab a biro from the holder and without having to look it up, I proceed to write down the last piece of the proof.

The letter I write to the Forrester Foundation, two hours later, is not the one I thought I’d write. It’s a lot shorter, for one thing, and it makes my heart sing, for another.

Dear Jack,

I trust the enclosed twelve notebooks comply with your requirement for supporting documentation detailing my process to arrive at the solution.

With gratitude and kind regards,

Dr. Anna Sanchez, née Miller

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