"Bite me!" She chewed lightly on the pencil eraser and arched her back more. Eyeing him up in the loft, making sure she had his attention, she turned back to the paper. "A… we can make A… the height of the loft… 9 feet… and then B would be…" She hesitated, putting her head on the table. She felt her body flush with the familiar shame. "I'm stupid," she called, her voice muffled. "I just totally blank. David, it's useless."

"Get the tape measure." David pointed. "Go ahead, get it." She picked it up, showing it to him. "Good, now, put your end on the X…and hand the other end to me." She did, catching the end of the tape measure with her toe so she could pull it out and meet David's outstretched hand. He had to hang halfway off the loft to reach her. He eyed her lengthened limbs, her muscles taut. She knew she was quite a sight.

"Nine feet, seven inches," he reported.

"So?" she shrugged.

"So now do the equation."

She put pencil back to the paper with a sigh. "Nine feet … squared… is eighty-one… four feet squared… is… sixteen… eighty-one plus sixteen… is ninety seven. So, it's ninety seven," Cat sighed. "Obviously I did it wrong again!"

"Remember your equation," David hinted.

She glanced back at the paper. "C… oh, squared. The square root of ninety seven… oh I'm supposed to do THAT in my head?" She looked up at him, exasperated.

"Calculator," he reminded her.

She punched in ninety seven and hit the square root key. "9.84." She shrugged, looking up at him quizzically. "So?"

"So it's 9.84. Which is roughly nine feet seven inches," he assured her, and waited.

Her jaw suddenly dropped. It was a true Helen Keller moment. Something incredibly simple that had taken her so long to actually comprehend. "That's what we measured? Nine feet seven inches?" she gasped. He nodded, his eyes bright with the light of her.