The Doomsday Equation by Matt Richtel Page A

clears her throat and begins her last-mile walk to Jeremy.
    Jeremy represses an urge to stand to meet her. Realizes he wants to save that movement for when it might really count. Before Jeremy can look down, in an effort to communicate his fake nonchalance, the old flames lock eyes.
    “We’re late, bunny. Let’s get a move on.” Emily’s balancing her coffee and a juice and a couple of pastries on a compostable brownish takeout tray. “What are you doing here, Jeremy?”
    “You can’t be serious,” Jeremy says. He juts his chin toward the guy. “The 1980s called. It wants the denim jacket back.”
    “Let’s go, bunny, we’re late.” Then to Jeremy: “Let’s do this later.”
    “There isn’t going to be any later.”
    Typically obtuse for Jeremy; he must be setting up someline of attack. But Emily senses that it’s dramatic in a way that Jeremy usually avoids until he’s launched his final verbal offensive. Which is why moisture glistens in her brown eyes, sympathy, yearning for understanding, not recrimination. His heart thump-thumps, a drumbeat urging him forward into an embrace or confession. He clears his throat.
    “Kent, bunny, can you go wait by the piano while I talk to Jeremy.” She extends a raisin muffin to the boy. He holds it, but doesn’t move. Emily grits her teeth at this impossible situation, her stubborn son and stubborn former lover. “It’s not healthy for you to be here.”
    “Not healthy?”
    “Jeremy . . .” She knows the essence of what’s coming, if not the exact words.
    “What’s not healthy is that raisin bran muffin. Tons of sugar. What’s not healthy is bringing home some strange man. It’s in all the literature. You’ve got to be sure he’s the guy. It’s sending Kent really confusing messages.”
    “I’m right here,” says Kent. “She didn’t bring him home.”
    “Not healthy, Jeremy? Like starting a fight in front of Kent? Like showing up at a café blocks from where we live; there’s a café every half block in this city. Like . . .” She pauses. She looks around, happy that no one seems to be paying attention, but still lowers her voice further. “I’m not doing this.”
    “He’s definitely not Jewish.” He’s looking at the guy who was with Emily and who now sits in a ratty high-backed chair near the front trying hard to pretend he’s flipping through a broadsheet.
    “That’s sheer desperation, and obnoxious, and neither, for that matter, is Kent’s dad, or you.” She pauses. “But you do need a coping mechanism.”
    He’s fighting for footing. “Did you notice his shoes?” Emily looks at the guy for a lingering second, looks back at Jeremy.
    “You are brilliant, Jeremy. I’m not disputing that. You are so kind when you want to be. Kent cherishes you. But you have the biggest blind spot of anyone I’ve ever known. You only see trees.”
    “The shoes and the jacket don’t match. Something’s off about that guy. There’s a lie in him. I’m guessing he picked you up at the gym, or after work. You fell for his apparent goofiness. You like a project. But this guy is a charade. He’s using you for something.”
    “All trees. No forest.” She shakes her head. She’s practically seething. Enough so that Jeremy lets himself look at her directly, another move he tries to avoid when in a heated conversation because it also can send the message: okay, I’m listening; you might have a point.
    “You can’t see the big picture, Jeremy. It’s pathological. You nit and pick and nitpick and nitpick. Challenge and refute. Then, when you finally let down your guard, whenever we got so close, you’d nit and pick and then go nuclear. You destroy everything in your path, tree by tree by tree.”
    Jeremy has to pause before responding. He’s impressed by her reasoning, flawed though it is. Usually, she’s led by succinct, true emotion, famous for such profundities as “I’m feeling sad.” It’s how she prefaced the final breakup with