Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

her go, considering if I should go after her, when Ève says, “If you were wondering, Maman, my concert last night went very well. I’m going to play another one in Brussels in the summer. I hope you’ll be able to come?”

I am tired of arguing with her. Tired of begging her to choose me, to choose science, and my mind is with Irène, imagining her walking into the lab without me, talking to Fred.

“Maman?” Ève asks.

“I will try, darling,” I say, distractedly. “I really will try.”

“I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU,” IRÈNE SAYS, A FEW WEEKS later at supper.

“Hmmm?” I am not very hungry tonight, and I have been looking over a paper, leaving my food barely touched. Irène has been quiet these last few weeks, tiptoeing around me, ever since I told her to stay away from Fred. I’m relieved she wants to tell me something now, and I put the paper down and look up.

“Fred and I are going to be married,” she says abruptly.

Her words reverberate and shock me, and I blink, thinking I misheard her. “What?”

She repeats it again, married, and I hear her, watch her lips move and her mouth turn up into a smile. But it is as if she’s speaking another language or playing one of Ève’s songs on the piano. Something I cannot possibly understand.

“No,” I say. “I will not allow it.”

Her smile turns to a frown, a look I have barely seen on her face, one that is more similar to Ève’s favorite expression. “Maman,” she says gently. “I am twenty-nine years old. Fred and I are in love.” She pauses. “We have everything you and Papa once had, a shared love of each other and our work. How can you not understand that?”

My eyes sting with tears, thinking of Pierre. A shared love of each other and our work. But that is what I have with Irène now. She is my partner; she is my confidante. What will I do without her?

And what would Pierre say, if he could be sitting here in this moment? We want her to be happy, mon amour. We want for her a good and easy life.

But she is happy already, with me.

Mon amour, she is a twenty-nine-year-old woman. She is in love.

But what does she know?

“Maman,” she tries gently again, bringing me back to her. “I’m not asking for your permission. I’m telling you what is going to happen. Fred and I love each other. We are getting married.”

What can I do? What can I say? I have lost so much, so many people. As worried as I am for her, giving herself over to a man, I cannot stop her. She is a grown woman, a brilliant scientist. But I cannot lose her either. And most importantly, she cannot lose her herself.

“I will insist upon a prenuptial agreement,” I finally say. “Stating that the lab and all the radium belongs to you and only you.”

“Fine,” she says. “Fred doesn’t care about any of that. He loves me, and I love him.”

“Perhaps you love him now.” I want her to understand, I only want what’s best for her. I do not want her to be hurt by love the way I have been. “But love is fleeting,” I tell her. “Science will never leave you.”

Marya

Warsaw, 1926–1932

After Klara graduated from the conservatory, she got a job with a symphony in London. And once she was supporting herself, I told Kaz what I desired more than anything was to move back to Warsaw, my childhood home. Agata had relocated to Warsaw after the war and had expanded our university there, renaming it Women’s University of Poland. I wanted to teach with her once more.

Kaz said that he, too, was ready for a change, and most of all, he wanted me to be happy. He retired from his position at Jagiellonian, and we moved into an apartment in Praga Połnoc, Warsaw, with a very nice view of the Vistula River from our bedroom. I returned to teaching with Agata just a few days after we moved in.

Our children were grown, and our lives were completely different than they once were—Agata’s husband had passed away three years ago, and her son Piotr was studying art in Krakow, but our friendship returned immediately, with all the ease we’d once had working together in the Kaminski house in Loksow.

“Oh, Marya,” Agata said. “How good it is to be with you again.” And I agreed completely, feeling the same about her. “The school was never the same without you.”

I smiled, relieved and happy, thanking her for welcoming me back after all this time and after all the work she had done to build it without me, from the small university it once was in Loksow.

But Agata said that she was the lucky one. “The students have so much to learn from you now, after what you have accomplished, Marya.” She beamed at me with pride.

After I went to Solvay with Hela a few years ago, she helped me patent my device, which I called the Mazur-Zorawksa detonator. But I did not desire money, or fame, and I’d handed the patent over to the Polish government in hopes they could explore ways to use it to help my beautiful country stay beautiful and free and Polish for many generations to come.

I had my experience in the lab and the Mazur-Zorawska detonator to teach a new generation of Polish women about. I taught chemistry and physics classes at Women’s University, as I once had, so many years ago. But now I had a very nice classroom, inside a very nice building, and no fear to walk inside of it.

I reveled in the comforts of teaching, of sitting inside a room with windows and walking to a café for lunch, breathing the fresh Warsaw air again. I loved the sounds of the free Polish language as I walked on the streets each evening toward home, the same paths I’d walked as