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months of fishing. They find their mates and chicks, among hundreds of others, by matching calls. You see, no two birds make the same precise call. And once a pair has mated, the exact sound of each other's cry is imprinted upon their—”
    “Hearts,” Stevie heard herself say out loud.
    “I was going to say ‘brains,'” Linus Mars said.
    The crowd of scientists laughed.
    “But of course, nothing is so clear-cut. The world is harsh for animals of all kinds, and it is natural for us—man—that is,
Homo sapiens
—to imagine an emotional connection as well as a biological one. Especially when, as is all too often the case, the mother does not return from the sea. As heroic as it might seem for the father to care for the egg, during those seventy-two days, he does not face the same southern ocean conditions, the same predators. Sometimes she doesn't return.” Stevie's eyes filled.
    “I therefore defer to the woman in the front row. ‘Heart' is also correct. In that, the body of any creature is a road map for all of its experiences, and therefore the sound of
Aptenodytes foresteri
's call is imprinted upon its mate's heart. And when the call is not answered, it creates a disaster that, as humans, we can imagine all too well.” He paused, staring down at her.
    When the lecture was over, the professor approached Stevie. Although she had by then dried her tears, he handed her a perfectly starched, folded linen handkerchief—just like the kind her father used to carry.
    “I'm fine,” she said. “But thank you.”
    “You seemed very engaged with the lecture.”
    “I'm writing a children's book about emperor penguins, and you gave me some wonderful material.”
    “I would have said . . . you were engaged with the love story.”
    “The love story?”
    The professor was very tall. His tweed jacket was heathery tan, of stiff, thorny yarn the color of a briar patch, and made Stevie think of trips she had taken with her father to Sligo, Galway, and the Aran Isles. He had hazel eyes with soft brown lashes. A pair of gold spectacles was about to fall out of his breast pocket; she gently pushed them back in.
    “The love of the father for his mate. And their offspring.”
    “I thought scientists didn't think that birds have love stories,” she said.
    “We don't. And they don't. But I thought perhaps you believed otherwise.”
    “I do,” she said.
    “That is honest of you to admit here in the bastion of biology—what you're saying is sacrilege to an ornithologist like myself.”
    “I'm sorry,” she said. “Artists don't always think in straight lines.”
    A troubled look crossed his brow. It lasted for a full ten seconds, and then he looked up at the ceiling and exhaled with abject regret. She wondered whether perhaps he had been too linear for too long.
    “I wish I could unlearn . . . certain things,” he said. “Rigidity of thought is a trap too many of us fall into. . . .”
    “Rigidity isn't all bad,” she whispered as she looked straight at his bare ring finger, as she thought of Kevin, at home at that minute, lying on the sofa with a beer and some bourbon, flipping channels on the TV in a miasmic puddle of despair.
    “Defend your thesis,” the professor said.
    “My husband was the most talented artist in our class,” Stevie said. “But then he stopped painting, because he said he wasn't inspired. I told him that discipline was more important than inspiration—any day. Go to your studio, and pictures will flow from your brush. That's how it happens—it's the alchemy of being an artist. The gift, you know? But it's getting to the easel that's the hard part.”
    “Did he listen to you?”
    She shook his head. “Now he never paints at all.” She felt swamped by the loneliness of being married to a man drinking himself into the distance.
    “I'm sorry.”
    Stevie nodded.
    “Do you really believe what you're saying? That discipline is more important than inspiration?”
    “Yes. I know it is. My