(A/N): My sincerest apologies for taking so long to post the last chapter! I have been traveling a lot as of late and have needed some uninterrupted time to just buckle down and finish this story for once and for all. I've loved writing this and I've loved hearing from every one of you. Thank you for everything! You're all flawlessly awesome people and I'm indebted. Have a wonderful rest of the summer!

With love,

Spark Writer

. . .

. . .

Later, Skye would look back on that week as one of the worst of her life.

It seemed to drag on into eternity, shrouding her clarity in a gray haze of doubt and heartache. Early on, she sometimes collided with Jeffrey in the hall or on the stairs—but rather than acknowledging her presence, he stared resolutely ahead, never so much as muttering an apology in her direction. Then he would exit the scene as though she had concealed a time bomb somewhere on her personage and it would explode if he didn't depart as quickly as possible. As the days stretched on, he seemed to have devised an elaborate sort of plan designed to avoid run-ins, because Skye saw not one glimpse of him after the third day of grueling awkwardness. To be fair, she spent most of her time locked in the guest room, puzzling bitterly over calculus equations with a curious tightness in her throat, while the world outside churned blithely on. Through her modest bedroom window, she could see the grass in Central Park, lush and luminous beneath a bright sky. Everywhere she turned; it seemed the city was bursting with color and vibrancy.

It was beautiful, and she loathed it.

Skye wanted lightning and floods and howling wind. She wanted the Earth to shudder beneath her feet and crack into pieces. She wanted a sign, an acknowledgment from the universe that something important had happened.

Instead, all she got was the odd, unsettling feeling that she'd left something, or that something had left her.

. . .

Six nights after the kiss, Skye was sitting alone in the living room, contemplating the wall. She was trying again to make sense of Jeffrey's evasive behavior. He initiated the kiss, she thought. It wasn't his place to avoid and ignore her like a temperamental toddler who hadn't gotten his way. It was extremely selfish behavior and she hated it, truly. The events in the kitchen seemed to have brought out the worst in her friend, and he wasn't the one grappling with a fresh Heartline on his wrist. A pang of hot rage leaped in her stomach and she fell back on the sofa, jaw clenched.

A montage of images flashed through her mind. Jeffrey: lying half-conscious beneath a hedge, flinging pebbles fearlessly at an angry bull, scattering reams of sheet music as he wrestled her beneath his grand piano, yanking Batty from the path of an approaching car, shooting ketchup smeared arrows at a very bad portrait of Dexter Dupree, sprinting in earnest toward the Penderwicks that last morning with a look on his face Skye would never forget. She thought of Jeffrey dribbling a soccer ball in his dormitory, then hurriedly snatching her by the arm and tugging them both under a bunk bed as agitated adult footsteps approached.

Flickers of other memories rose to the surface, like the strange, affectionate remarks Jeffrey made when he assumed Skye wasn't really listening. Like the times he held her gaze for just a moment too long. Like the sweetly melancholy clarinet pieces he played for no one at all, never knowing Skye was just out of sight around the corner, listening as she'd never listened before and feeling as though she had known the boy all her life but didn't really know him at all.

Skye sat up.

She was tired of being delicate. She wanted an explanation, a straight answer, a yes or no. For eleven years she had ignored everything, convinced herself it was enormously foolish to entertain any thoughts of Jeffrey as anything but a friend. But the kiss had presented an opportunity and the Heartline had confirmed it. Her worst fears had come to pass; there was nothing left to lose. And Heartline or not, she was beginning to see that she did in fact love Jeffrey. She had always loved him in a stubborn, bumbling way. He was still her dearest friend, something had simply changed. Neither of them had noticed it before, but it seemed that all the lines they'd carefully placed in the sand had blown away when they weren't looking.

Now, she felt it was time to end the gut twisting back-and-forth of adolescent confusion and chemistry. They deserved the truth. That much was obvious.

. . .

It was well past midnight when a key clicked in the lock and the apartment door edged carefully open. Jeffrey stood on the threshold, his silhouette illuminated by the fluorescent glare of the hall light. He paused for a moment, then stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, throwing everything into momentary darkness. Only when he fumbled clumsily for a lamp and turned to put his jacket down did he notice Skye sitting at one end of the sofa, watching him.

He froze.

"We need to talk," said Skye, her calm exterior belying her racing heart.

"There's nothing to talk about."

"You know damn well there is!"

Jeffrey blinked at her, startled by the uncharacteristic usage of a four-letter word. He shifted uncomfortably and sank into the armchair opposite Skye. He seemed to toy with several responses but eventually gave up, falling into an awkward silence.

"I just want to know why. Why did you act that way in the kitchen last week, then completely ignore me? I deserve an explanation at the very least."

Jeffrey stared at her with those unfathomable green eyes for a moment before speaking. "Look, Skye, I didn't intend to . . . I never wanted to ruin our relationship. You know that. I know you know that. But I don't think there's a way to explain what happened, so I'm not going to try. I just need you to know that I'm sorry for any damage done."

"But you've avoided me all week."

He was tactful enough not to point out the fact that she herself had spent the majority of the week holed up in the guest room. "Only because I thought it was in our best interest to have some time apart after . . . things."

"Well, there's where you were wrong," said Skye, growing angrier. "Because I've been turning myself inside out trying to understand the nature of our relationship, trying to piece together our experiences into a story that makes sense, trying to figure out if our whole friendship has been a lie. And on top of it, I have to live with a reminder now."

Jeffrey's eyes widened in a way that might have been comical had the situation been less tense. Skye could almost see the cogs turning beneath his scalp as he fought to understand the meaning of her last remark.

"I'll save you the time," she murmured.

And pushed up her left sleeve.

Her Heartline was cheerily crimson against a backdrop of creamy skin and Jeffrey stared at it first in shock, then wonderment, as though he was glimpsing something rare and precious. Which, in her case, perhaps he was.

"I can't believe it," he said after a long pause.

"Yes," Skye said sarcastically. "I present to you rare proof that Skye Penderwick does, in fact, have a heart."

"It's lovely," he said. The words made something like sunlight burst in her chest. "But I don't—"

"I never told you this," she interrupted, "but I've dedicated my life to not getting a Heartline. I find the whole affair tedious and confusing, and have always feared that love and Heartlines would distract me from accomplishing the things I want to accomplish. Since I was young I've watched these silly marks eat away at people's lives and I never wanted that to happen to me. No one seemed worth that sort of sacrifice. But I'm starting to think there's a possibility I was wrong."

"Wrong? Wrong how?" asked Jeffrey, a fire burning behind his eyes.

"You put this Heartline on my arm, Jeffrey, despite all my attempts at ignoring my affection for you. I always smother emotion with rationality. But somehow you managed to shatter a logician's rigid formula, and frankly, I couldn't be more grateful. I used to believe I would regret getting a Heartline, but I could never regret you."

Jeffrey seemed momentarily too stunned to respond, so Skye took advantage of his silence to say, "I thought my feelings would fade with time, but now I know there's a reason why Heartlines never go away. Love can change, and people can part ways and move on, but the ones who make it into our hearts are always in there somewhere. I don't know what I'd do if you weren't in my life. I—" her voice wavered, but Jeffrey immediately leaned over and squeezed her hand in warm reassurance. "I'm terrified of how much you could hurt me if you wanted to, but," she inhaled sharply and squared her shoulders, "I trust you not to. There's no one I feel safer giving my heart to. I know you don't feel the same way, but I know you'll take care of it. I don't regret this, Jeffrey. I love you."

In an instant, Jeffrey had abandoned the armchair and launched himself onto the stretch of sofa beside her. "Skye. God, I love you, too. I love you so much."

There was a bittersweet ring to those words. He didn't really love her, not in that way. If he did, he would have five marks on his wrist, not four. That was the thing about Heartlines. They didn't necessarily come in pairs.

"But you only—" Skye glanced at his left forearm, which was obscured by a navy shirtsleeve. "You don't actually—it's fine." She cleared her throat. "Just as long as we remain friends, that's all I ask."

Jeffrey looked quite taken aback. "No," he said, rumpling his hair in frustration. "That isn't the only possible outcome of this situation."

"How can there be another?"

"I wasn't just saying that I love you. I do."

"You don't! At least, not enough for me to give you a Heartline. This is what I meant, Jeffrey," said Skye. "Heartlines take perfectly good relationships and tear them apart. I don't want to stand here watching our friendship go up in flames." She stood, cheeks flaming. Tipsy laughter rolled in through one of the half opened windows, so she marched over and slammed it down with all her pent up angst and frustration. "Look, if you don't actually love me, just be an adult and say so. I don't want to listen some ridiculous lie designed to spare my feelings."

Then Jeffrey was on his feet, facing her, eyes glittering with something fierce and bright. "Come here."

Skye didn't move for a moment, then wordlessly approached him.

Jeffrey took the fabric of his shirtsleeve and pushed it carefully up his arm, revealing his four Heartlines. "Look at the last one," he said softly.

Skye did, and saw that it was glowing faintly. The others were not. They seemed dim and ordinary by comparison.

"Now look at yours."

Skye raised her left forearm to the light and saw to her utter astonishment that her's was glowing as well. She bit back a gasp.

Jeffrey smiled. "Heartlines never glow when the love is one-sided. You should know that, I thought you were an expert."

"I don't understand, I thought—"

"Do you remember Ava Nelson?" asked Jeffrey, cutting her off.

"She was your last girlfriend."

"Right, and we were together when I got my fourth Heartline."

"I don't see how this is relevant," said Skye. "That was ages ago. Two years."

"Yes, well, at the time I thought I got a Heartline because I was in love with her. I was wrong, though," he added. "It was never her. It was you. She reminded me of you."

The world came to a screeching halt.

"I broke it off with Ava because something just didn't feel right. And for a while I thought the problem had been solved. But then I started noticing that this Heartline would tingle every time I was with you. Then I realized."

"Oh my god." Skye made no efforts at her concealing her shock. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I could see your left wrist, Skye. There wasn't a single Heartline. Telling you would have ruined the good we already had. But now you see I was telling the truth. I do love you."

Skye's Heartline glowed like the sun and she placed her hand on Jeffrey's cheek. "Thank you," she whispered.

Then they were leaning in like two magnets drawn together; it was a great inevitability. It had always been.

This time the kiss was free of doubt and worry. The sensation Skye felt in that moment was betrayed by the confines of the English language. It was perfection and radiance and cosmos and microbe and everything and nothing all fused into one impossibility that made her dizzy at the thought of assigning a word to it. No amount of alphabetic sawdust could ever contain the breadth and depth of this culmination of every decision she had ever made in life. This was herself as a link in an unfathomable chain reaction, and she never wanted it to end.

. . .

Skye was beginning to understand why so many people believed in God.

Of all the choices she could have made, the glaring majority of them had led her to solving physics equations, avoiding others, and generally being on her own.

She hadn't ended up with the life she'd thought she would have. Skye had offered herself to another person, and that person had accepted her completely, despite a plethora of logical reasons that should have chased her away. People could betray each other or get divorced or decide their differences were irreconcilable, but that was not one of the paths available to her. Skye was going to spend her life with one phenomenal, stubborn, determined and utterly flawless man, and nothing could ever change that. The end and beginning of all there was had started with a chance collision in a secret hedge passageway and not the slightest inkling that an undiscovered force of nature had just been set into motion.

But it would end some day, as all great things inexorably did.

And Skye, despite every drive of logic and rationale, couldn't help but hope in the deepest chasm of her heart that she and Jeffrey would always exist, that there would never be an end to them. They would come together again, and even though it defied the scientific world she loved—the world she could touch and quantify and verify with her own two eyes—she hoped, fiercely and completely, that their bond was infinite.

She hoped—no, she prayed—for the very first time in her life, that she was wrong. She prayed there was more than what her mind, for all the things it could do that others could not, could understand.

She prayed that not even death could separate a pair as perfect as Skye Magee Penderwick and Jeffrey Tifton.

. . .

The End

. . .