Chapter 24 #2
“Elegant proofs,” Leonard sighed with the reverence of someone who understood. “God, I miss those. Now I’m trying to explain the quadratic formula to teenagers who think math is what happens when their phone calculates their Starbucks order.”
“You love those kids,” Bridget accused.
“I love that they occasionally understand what I’m teaching them. There’s a difference.”
“Speaking of understanding—” Frank turned to Ty, who’d been suspiciously quiet “—how’s the shoulder? Still pretending it doesn’t hurt?”
“It’s fine.”
“He’s lying,” Donovan said, his first contribution to the conversation. “Caught him doing one-armed push-ups yesterday because the regular kind hurt too much.”
“Snitches get stitches,” Ty muttered.
“You did what?” Annabel’s voice took on what I was beginning to recognize as her medical-professional tone. “Tyler Matthew Hughes, you’re supposed to be healing, not destroying what’s left of your rotator cuff.”
“It’s been eight weeks—”
“Six,” everyone corrected in unison.
I watched the exchange with fascination. This was nothing like the formal dinners between my father and me, where conversation followed predictable patterns and we’d maintained appropriate professional distance.
This was…alive. Messy. Real.
“Charlotte’s been dealing with some interesting theoretical challenges at work,” Ty said, deflecting attention from his shoulder. “Maybe she could explain the general concepts.”
“Please do,” Leonard said, leaning forward eagerly. “I haven’t heard anyone talk about real mathematics in months.”
So I did. I explained the theoretical framework, the challenge of creating destructive interference without triggering the very reaction we were trying to prevent.
Frank asked about historical precedents for defensive technology.
Bridget wanted to know about the legal implications.
Annabel drew parallels to medical intervention protocols. Leonard just reveled in the equations.
They followed along. All of them. Not just nodding politely, but actually engaging, asking questions that showed they understood the concepts, if not the specifics.
“The problem,” I said, gesturing with my fork, “is that the frequency signature is dynamic. It adapts based on the battery’s chemical state. So any countermeasure has to be equally adaptive without becoming predictable.”
I didn’t tell them that the practical ramifications of what we were talking about might get thousands of people killed.
“More wine?” Bridget offered, but I barely heard her. I needed to get back to my work. This was enjoyable, but…
“You okay there, Charlotte?” Leonard asked. “You’ve got that look my best students get right before they solve something particularly thorny.”
“I need to—” I started to stand, but Ty’s hand covered mine on the table. The touch was electric, intimate, a reminder of everything unresolved between us.
“Finish dinner first,” he said quietly. “It’s not going anywhere.”
He was right. For once, the problem could wait twenty more minutes. I settled back into my chair, watching the Hughes siblings continue their verbal gymnastics. It was, in fact, helping my brain to relax and reset.
“Remember when Ty tried to help me with calculus?” Bridget was saying. “Ended with him throwing the textbook out the window.”
“It was a stupid book,” Ty defended. “Nothing about it made sense to me.”
“That’s because you were trying to memorize formulas instead of understanding concepts,” Bridget shot back.
“Did you even pass?” Leonard asked Ty with a knowing grin.
“Eventually,” Ty muttered. “With a C minus.”
“After three attempts,” Donovan added helpfully.
Frank gestured at Ty with his fork. “You barely passed calculus, but your tactical mind is sharper than anyone’s at this table.”
“It’s just training,” Ty deflected.
“Training?” Leonard scoffed. “You redesigned the church’s evacuation plan when you were twelve because you said theirs would cause a bottleneck.”
“It would have,” Ty muttered. “Still would, actually. They never fixed it.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Frank continued. “We’ve all got our strengths. Leonard sees patterns in numbers. Annabel reads bodies and birth. Donovan has amazing aptitude with animals. Bridget can argue anyone into submission—”
“I prefer ‘vigorous negotiation,’” Bridget interrupted.
“—and Ty keeps people alive. Different applications of intelligence. And Charlotte here? She’s building something to save millions of lives with math and physics. We all use what we’ve got.”
The conversation shifted to childhood memories, Ty’s father and mother joining into the conversation a lot more, but I found myself studying Ty.
He laughed at the right moments, contributed when called upon, but there was a tension in his shoulders.
Like he was performing a role he’d never quite learned the lines for.
His siblings clearly respected what he did—Frank had just said as much—but Ty didn’t seem to hear it. Or believe it.
Back at the guesthouse, with Ethan and the others, he’d been secure, focused, in his element. Here, he seemed much less secure of himself.
He started carrying dishes into the kitchen.
“I should help with that.” I began collecting plates.
“Absolutely not,” Ty’s mother said, appearing from the kitchen where she’d been putting together dessert. “You’re a guest.”
“I insist.” I followed Ty into the kitchen anyway, needing to move, to process what was rattling around in my brain.
We worked in companionable silence for a few minutes, loading dishes into the dishwasher. Through the window, I could see Ben outside with Jolly, maintaining their security so we could have a dinner.
“Your family’s wonderful,” I said.
“They’re something.” He handed me a plate, our fingers brushing in the exchange.
“They really love you,” I said, watching how his jaw tightened slightly. “The teasing, the stories—it’s how they show it.”
“Yeah, well, they’ve got plenty of material to work with. The family screwup who barely graduated high school.”
I set the plate in the drying rack, turning to face him. “Is that really what you think? Because that’s not what I saw at dinner.”
His hands stilled in the soapy water. “What do you mean?”
“Frank literally spelled it out—different kinds of intelligence, all equally valuable. Your siblings know exactly how smart you are, just in a different way than them. They respect what you do, Ty. They trust you.”
He was quiet for a moment, processing what I’d said. Then he turned off the water and dried his hands slowly, like he was buying time to think.
“Maybe,” he said finally. “It’s just hard to see it that way when you’ve spent your whole life being the one who couldn’t keep up academically. Even Donovan went to college.”
“I agree that your intelligence isn’t necessarily traditional—maybe you’re not book smart—but that doesn’t mean your intelligence isn’t there. It’s adaptive. You see the variables and adapt as needed.”
I froze, the countermeasure materializing before my eyes. The solution that had been dancing at the edges of my consciousness crystallized with perfect clarity. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Different applications. Adaptive responses. Context-dependent variables.” I dropped the towel, my hands already moving like I was typing.
“I’ve been trying to create a universal counter-frequency, but that’s not how the Cascade Protocol works.
It adapts. So the stabilizer code needs to adapt too, but inversely.
Not one solution—multiple solutions applied contextually. ”
“Charlotte—”
“Like your tactical analysis. You don’t have one response to every threat. You read the situation and adapt. The code needs to do the same thing. Read the battery’s state and apply the appropriate counter-frequency from a matrix of possibilities.”
My mind was already racing through the implementation. Parallel processing threads, each monitoring different chemical signatures, responding with targeted interference patterns…
“Ty, I need to go.” I was already moving toward the door. Ty, as if to prove my point, had already adapted to this new variable and was moving with me.
“I know how to finish the countermeasure.”