Science requires patience, and I have always been an impatient person. But what I lived for was that private moment, discovering something no one else had. The moment before it is shared with others—when it is a secret, only yours. In that moment it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment but a gift from some god.

How thoughtless we had been, to believe that trees needed to be useful, or that usefulness was even the point.

What interested me was the opposite: the nearly imperceptible. Biology fascinated me, the astonishing intricacy of who we were born as and became. Invisible codes made us. Our cells carried the instructions with which we formed ourselves.

The sunshine woke us. We hadn’t had the foresight to pull the shades down. One of my arms, in a trapezoid of light, had burned to pink. He blew on my arm to cool it, and in that moment, what love was seemed so clear to me: the need to guard against loss. If I lost him, I thought then, feeling his cool breath against my hot arm, I would never recove

Life merged with his was undoubtedly easier: Money made it so. The pristine white kitchen, its marble counter that glistened. Matching silverware and glassware. No unintentional duplicates, no warped plastic spatulas or branded beer openers.

My husband was presumptuous, overly confident: What advertised him as an authority actually made him, in my view, a lesser scientist. Science required a sense of openness to being wrong: uncertainty over its opposite. They saw competence in Charles, because they knew the story of him. They were familiar with the narratives of men like him, confiden

Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here—winners in a stupefying lottery. We came at the exact right moment, a blip in the hundred million centuries of the universe: the Earth inhabitable, not yet engulfed by the sun, but not only molten magma, inhospitable to life. The planet cooled and

They argued relentlessly about things that didn’t matter, which I thought boded well for the relationship. Their arguments were trivial, easy to recover from.

I thought of myself as a lotus plant—growing from the dirtiest mud but, in the sun, blossoming, untouched by the mud it originated from.