“Okay.”
I work until 2 AM. Nothing.
I work until 3 AM. Still a dead end.
At 3:17 AM, I’m staring at this linkage with dead-eyed exhaustion. I think about how I’ve been running the same diagnostic loop for seven days. I’m looking at it from the same angle, with the same baked-in assumptions, and the error is hiding in the foundation, not the structure.
I save the file.
Open a new one.
I finish the whole new build in six days. It’s better than the original—cleaner distribution, stronger linkage, an actually elegant solution. I don’t tell Reid he was right.
But I notice that every night he glances at my screen while I’m working, and whatever he sees there makes him go back to his desk without a word. I’m like eighty percent sure the corner of his mouth is doing a thing.
* * *
I figure out Reid’s cigarette schedule pretty early on.
Midnight, always. Sometimes earlier if a study session trashed his brain. Sometimes he’ll do one in the morning off the window ledge—always outside, because Walker asked him to, and Reid, I’ve noticed, always does what Walker asks.
I don’t really smoke unless someone’s passing a bowl, but I start timing my water breaks around midnight—an observation I’m hard-passing on investigating too closely—and sometimes I’ll just hang on my bed while he leans out the window. We’ll talk, or we won’t. Both are fine.
The things I learn about Reid during those nights are:
He grew up in a small town. A place, according to him, that can be wonderful or suffocating depending on who you are, and Reid was clearly the second one. He had three friends in high school—two he still talks to, one he doesn’t (no explanation offered). He chose criminal justice because he hates bullies, not because he wants to be a cop. He says that with a specificity that tells me people have made that assumption before and it pissed him off.
He reads more than anyone I know. He’ll drop a reference casually, and you realize an hour later he just linked your random comment to some heavy-duty 18th-century legal shit.
Okay, fine, youwon’trealize that at all, but that’s what he does.
He thinks Miles is smarter than he lets on, and it pisses him off. He thinks Finn is smarter than we give him credit for, which is a deeper observation that took me a minute to process.
He almost ghosted the interview for the room. He tells me this one night, blowing smoke out the window, not looking at me. He’d walked in, saw me, Grant, and Walker, and made a snap judgment.
I get it. Grant is a massive wall of muscle in a jersey. Walker was shirtless and fresh from a heavy lift. And I apparently looked exactly like “those guys”—a phrase he says with a flatness that implies some heavy history. He’d decided we were all the same brand of douche before we’d even opened our mouths.
“Jock house,” he says, shaking his head. “I almost canceled it.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Finn answered the door,” he gives as the full explanation. And actually, yeah. “Then I realized you are all just a bunch of nerds.”
I let a beat pass. Then I say, “I was in my high school’s robotics program... and I was also a star football player.”
Reid looks at me, finally.
“I got offered a sports scholarship,” I continue, fully committed now. “And a merit scholarship. I took just the merit one.”
He stares at me for a long, unreadable moment.
“I don’t know,” he says slowly, “if I should be disgusted or genuinely impressed by that information.”
I snort, and he laughs.
All that doesn’t come out in a straight line. It comes out in pieces, across weeks, the way things come out when two people are in a room together long enough. I tell him things, too—about the robotics showcase, the professor who’s out to get me for no reason, and my family. Just the surface-level stuff, enough to be real without being a lot.
Reid listens quietly.
