Hero’s Touch

Chapter 1

Two years ago – First exchange:

Mercury: Not everything is about efficiency.

Binary: Explain.

Mercury: It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines. Read the first letter of each line.

Binary: “Stay safe stranger.”

Mercury: Sometimes beauty IS the function.

Binary: …Interesting.

Lincoln Bollinger was typing on a laptop he’d brought to a bar on a Saturday night, and he saw absolutely nothing wrong with this.

The crack of the cue ball against the eight ball made him glance up just in time to catch Theo Lindstrom’s groan.

“That’s another twenty you owe me.” Bear leaned his pool cue against the table, grinning. Lincoln’s cousin had been hustling pool at the Eagle’s Nest since they were teenagers—longer, if you counted the years their dads had looked the other way.

Theo was already fishing bills from his wallet. “Double or nothing.”

“You know he’s just going to take your money again,” Lincoln said, eyes back on his screen.

“Thank you for that stunning insight.” Theo lined up another shot—an impossible bank, two rails minimum. “Some of us enjoy the process.”

“The process of losing?”

“The process of trying, Linc. It’s a human thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

Lincoln almost smiled. Theo had been giving him grief since third grade, when Lincoln had corrected their teacher’s math in front of the whole class and couldn’t figure out why everyone was mad about it—something about extra homework. Twenty-some years later, Theo still hadn’t let him forget it.

“You’re at the wrong angle,” Lincoln said without looking up. “You need forty-three degrees. You’re closer to fifty.”

Theo took the shot anyway. The eight ball missed the pocket by two inches.

“You could’ve told me that before I shot.”

“I gave you the data. You chose optimism over mathematics.”

Bear laughed, catching the twenty Theo slapped into his palm. “When are you going to learn? My cousin is never wrong about numbers.”

“He’s wrong about plenty of other things.” Theo dropped into the booth across from Lincoln, next to Derek. “Social cues, for example.”

“I’m adequate at social cues.”

Bear and Derek exchanged a look.

“I’m adequate.”

His cousin Derek slid a glass of water across the table—the only thing Lincoln ever ordered here. “You eat yet?”

“I ate at six.”

“Of course you did.” Derek shook his head. “Six on the dot—still running on Aunt Quinn’s dinner schedule after all these years.”

Lincoln shrugged. Routine worked. His Harvard-educated mother had understood that before anyone else, building structure into his childhood that let his brain do what it needed to do without falling apart.

Dinner at six. Homework at seven. Bed by ten.

The schedule had evolved over the years, but the principle remained.

“Must be nice having a schedule. I’ve gained ten pounds since Joy started testing food truck recipes on me.”

“That sounds like a positive outcome,” Lincoln said.

“It is. I’m not complaining. I’m just saying my pants don’t fit anymore.”

The Eagle’s Nest hummed around them—locals at the bar, a group attempting darts with more enthusiasm than skill, some old country song on the jukebox that Bear kept paying to replay because he knew it annoyed Theo.

Lincoln had calculated once that he’d spent well over 1000 hours in this booth over the past decade. It wasn’t his natural habitat—too loud, too unpredictable, too many variables—but these Saturday nights had become part of his routine too.

Bear and Derek had been dragging him out of the Bat Cave for years, long before he’d built and sold the two software companies that had made him a millionaire. “You need people,” Bear always said.

Lincoln wasn’t sure he agreed. But he’d shown up anyway, because Bear and Derek had been showing up for him his whole life.

They’d invented the inside voice code when they were kids—a way to warn Lincoln when he was in the middle of saying something that would get him punched or ostracized or sent to the principal’s office.

They’d run interference at family gatherings, translated his bluntness into something the rest of the world could digest, included him in things even when he made those things harder. Theo had too, and he wasn’t even related by blood like Linc’s cousins.

He owed them Saturday nights. He could tolerate Saturday nights.

Bear’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, grinning. “Uh-oh. Joy’s pretending to be mad.”

“Pretending?” Theo asked. “How do you know? What’s her tell?”

“She used a period instead of an exclamation point.” Bear turned the phone around so they could see. “That’s basically Joy screaming.”

Derek snorted. “What’d you do?”

“Forgot to call one of the wedding caterers. Apparently, there are three. She sent a spreadsheet.”

“There’s a spreadsheet?” Lincoln looked up. Finally, something in this conversation that made sense. “Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a spreadsheet?”

“Because it’s for the wedding, Linc. Which you’re not planning.”

“I could help. Spreadsheets are organizational tools. I’m good at organization.”

“You’re good at taking over,” Bear said. “There’s a difference. Last time you helped with something, you reorganized my entire filing system for the garage, and I couldn’t find anything for a month.”

“You couldn’t find anything because your system was chaos. I improved it.”

“You improved it for you. The rest of us don’t think in whatever robot language your brain runs on.”

Lincoln turned that over. He’d genuinely been trying to help. The system made sense to him. It hadn’t occurred to him that Bear’s brain might need a different architecture.

“It’s just…logical.”

Bear winked at him. “You’re just more logical than all of us combined. Don’t sweat it.”

Derek’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, grinning. “Becky wants to know if we’re actually playing pool or just sitting around gossiping.”

“Tell her we’re doing both.” Theo raised his beer in a mock toast. “Multitasking.”

“And tell her Lincoln’s hogging the booth with his laptop,” Bear added. “Like always.”

Lincoln ignored them. His algorithm was almost debugged—one more pass through the recursive function and he’d have the memory leak isolated. He could feel the solution hovering just out of reach, that particular itch in his brain that meant he was close.

But his eyes kept drifting to the clock on his screen. 8:41.

Nineteen minutes.

“You’ve checked the time four times in the last ten minutes,” Derek said.

“Twelve minutes. And it was three times.”

“What’s at nine o’clock that’s so important?”

“Nothing.”

Derek raised an eyebrow. “Why is it I’m thinking you’re lying to me, cuz?”

Lincoln closed his laptop. There was no point pretending to work when his brain had already shifted focus, already started the countdown to the only appointment that actually mattered tonight.

“I have a prior commitment.”

Bear raised an eyebrow. “At nine p.m. on a Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of commitment?”

“The prior kind.”

Theo snorted. “He’s got a secret girlfriend. Calling it now.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

Theo grinned. “Secret boyfriend?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend either.” Lincoln kept his voice flat, but his leg was bouncing under the table. He forced it to stop.

“Secret something.” Bear leaned forward. “Look at him—he’s practically twitching.”

He wasn’t twitching. He was anticipating. There was a difference.

“Is this like Thanksgiving?” Derek asked. “When you left between the turkey and the pie to verify some equation?”

“That was important. And I came back for pie.”

“You came back at midnight. We’d already put the pie away.”

“Then it’s a good thing I don’t like pie.”

He stood up and dropped cash on the table—exact amount plus twenty-two percent tip, which he’d calculated as the optimal percentage for maintaining goodwill without appearing ostentatious.

Bear shook his head, but he was smiling. “You’re a weird guy, Linc.”

“Yes.”

“We love you anyway.”

“I know.” Lincoln shouldered his bag. “That’s why I show up.”

He was halfway to the door when Theo called after him, “Same time next week?”

“Same time next week.”

The door swung shut behind him, cutting off the warmth and noise of the bar. Outside, the Wyoming night stretched cold and quiet, exactly the way Lincoln preferred it.

He had seventeen minutes to get home.

His SUV waited in the far corner of the lot, parked deliberately in the spot with the clearest exit path and lowest probability of door dings from neighboring vehicles.

He drove exactly the speed limit. Not because he feared tickets—his legal team could handle any traffic violation—but because the limit existed for calculated reasons involving reaction time, braking distance, and statistical accident rates. Deviation introduced unnecessary variables.

His phone buzzed in the cupholder. Then again. A third time.

Lincoln didn’t look. He knew it was Bear without checking. Some variation of you’re being weirder than usual and is there something going on.

Bear worried. Hell, they all did—his cousins, his parents, the whole sprawling Bollinger family. Nobody quite understood him, but they’d spent thirty years loving him anyway, making room for his quirks, pulling him back into the world when he drifted too far into his own head.

But Bear was just the most persistent about it.

The same protective instinct that had driven him and Derek to develop the inside voice code when they were children had him showing up at Lincoln’s house unannounced to make sure he’d eaten actual food.

Lincoln appreciated it. He just didn’t know how to say so in ways that translated.

The gates to his property recognized his vehicle’s signature and swung open.

Motion sensors tracked his progress up the winding drive, a half mile of maintained gravel that discouraged casual visitors and provided multiple surveillance points.

Everyone called the compound “Bruce Wayne Manor” because they thought they were clever.

Lincoln called it home because it was the only place his brain ever approached anything like quiet.