This time, I didn’t have to run home from work to show my husband the story I had written about him. He eagerly grabbed it from me the minute he saw it. I looked over his shoulder as he read.

When I was fourteen years old, I cheated on a test. It was wrong. I knew it then, and I know it now. I’m sure if I had gotten caught the teacher would have said I was only cheating myself, but I think we all know that isn’t true. I was cheating off Parker Thaysden, who, even though he was three years younger, was the smartest guy in my math class. I told myself I hadn’t meant to look over and see his answer, that it was simply a coincidence that the problem I was stuck on was one that happened to be right in my view. But, deep down, I knew the truth.

Eight days later, I found out I could never have children, that I had primary ovarian insufficiency syndrome.

I thought it was because I’d cheated on my math test.

Twenty-ish years later, I still can’t explain the exact laws of karma (or, as might be obvious, the laws of exponents), but what I do know is that fate very rarely delivers upon that straight of a line. Maybe I did something—or a whole string of things—right, because, despite the odds, despite the truth I had long known, I did end up with babies. A perfect, matching set of them, in fact. They came from the journalist and philanthropist Greer McCann Thaysden’s gorgeous eggs.

I was always better in science than I was in math, thank goodness. Maybe that’s what drew me to investigate what people do with their extra frozen embryos. Maybe that’s what led me uncover that Greer’s embryos had been deemed abandoned.

The day in eighth grade I told Parker Thaysden I’d copied off his paper, I didn’t know what was going to happen. In fact, I had stayed up half the night worried and wondering. Would he tell the teacher? The principal? Would I get expelled? None of that happened. He said, “Who cares, Amelia? I had the answer, and you didn’t.”

That rings true now, as I hold this beautiful pair of babies in my arms. My ladybug and four-leaf clover. That’s what Greer had nicknamed them; that was what they looked like under a microscope. Who knew they would turn out to be my lucky charms? Who knew that what I didn’t have, Greer would end up giving me?

I would eventually pay Parker Thaysden back by writing a biology essay for him. On mitosis, in fact. The cell division that results in two child cells having the same number and kind of chromosome as the parent.

No, these babies don’t have the exact number and kind of chromosome as Parker. Only half. Half-Parker, half-Greer. But when they kicked inside of me, when the doctor laid their warm, tiny bodies on my chest, they became mine, too.

I never expected to fall in love with the boy next door, with the one whose paper I’d cheated off of. I never expected to get pregnant with his babies. And I never, ever imagined that doing each of those things would heal what was broken inside of me, what had been broken, in fact, since that day I sat on a cold doctor’s office table in a thin gown, receiving the hardest news of my life. I never expected that thirteen pounds, eight ounces of babies could connect Parker and me to his late wife in such an inextricable way, while also giving us both permission to truly release her.

But maybe Parker did. In fact, his childhood voice rings in my ears now, as I place my babies side by side in their crib overlooking a mesmerizing stretch of sound that is always the same and yet never the same. I had the answer, and you didn’t.

It isn’t math; it most certainly is science. And, at first, I thought that, surely, it was modern love.

Generations of Saxtons and Thaysdens have welcomed their children home to this tiny peninsula, this singular spot in one of the world’s most beautiful forgotten corners. I watched the way my babies turned toward each other, by instinct, the way they fussed and then, their eyes fixing on me, their mother, settled. And I finally realized that, this love? It wasn’t as modern as I once believed. Quite the opposite, in fact.

This was a love as old as time.