Chapter 1 – The Ring in the Pocket and the Shadow of the BusThe Chicago rain didn’t just fall; it wept, beating a relentless, heavy rhythm against the cracked aluminum roof of the bus shelter. My fingers were clamped so tightly around the velvet ring box in my coat pocket that the sharp edge of the hidden hinge bit directly into my palm.

turned to look at me, time had simply collapsed. Those eyes—that unmistakable gray-blue shade with the slight, stubborn tilt at the corner—were a mirror image of the face I shaved every single morning. They were the eyes of my late grandfather, the eyes my mother had traced with pride, the eyes that stared back at me from every photograph of my childhood.

“How old are they?” I had asked her.

And her voice, hoarse and breaking against the roar of the traffic, had whispered back: “Three.”

Three.

The mathematical impossibility