Chapter 28: Not Alone
Wednesday4:00 AM
Still dark outside.
"I hate you," Missy muttered, eyes closed, as Sheldon's alarm went off.
Sheldon got up without responding and went to the garage.
He'd set up the chairs the night before — a dozen of them, spacing mathematically precise. Now he filled an ice bucket with cartons of cold milk, arranged glasses in a neat row, placed a spoon in each one. He tuned the radio until he found the Swedish broadcast covering the Nobel Prize preparations, and smiled at the sound of it.
Then he sat down in his chair, facing the garage door, and waited.
By 4:50, nobody had come.
His mother appeared in the doorway in her bathrobe.
"I don't think anyone's coming," Sheldon said quietly.
"Oh, baby." Mary's heart broke a little. "Mommy's here."
"I know." Sheldon looked at the empty chairs. "You've always been here. You're my mom."
The broadcast announced the start of the ceremony. Mary asked if he wanted her to stay. He shook his head, and she went back inside.
He listened alone. When the winner was announced — not the scientist he'd been hoping for — Sheldon sat very still for a moment.
Then he cried. Quietly, by himself, in the garage, at five in the morning.
Noon — School Library
Sheldon sat at a table with the specific posture of someone who did not want to be spoken to.
Juno nudged Adam. "Is he okay?"
"He's fine," Adam said, glancing over. "Nobody showed up this morning. He's processing it."
"Poor kid." Juno frowned. "If I'd known I would have gone."
"He wasn't alone though," Adam said.
Juno looked at him. "What do you mean? You just said nobody came."
Adam paused, aware that Sheldon's attention had drifted toward them despite his posture suggesting otherwise. He thought about it for a moment and then said, more carefully:
"Because somewhere this morning, at five AM, there were other people doing the same thing. Some kid in glasses sitting at a desk buried in textbooks, listening to the same broadcast. Some guy at a computer, staying up all night, following the announcement. Some incredibly wealthy, slightly eccentric person on the other side of the world with a whole staff around him, still caring more about the Nobel Prize than anything else happening in the room."
He paused.
"And maybe somewhere — some girl who fell asleep before she meant to. Some little kid who didn't quite understand it yet but would one day. Some future scientist watching something completely unrelated and not knowing yet who she's going to become."
He shrugged slightly. "None of them know Sheldon right now. But if things work out the way they sometimes do — they'll all be in his life eventually. Putting up with everything he is, day after day. Not because they have to. Because they actually choose to."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Juno looked at him with an expression he didn't know what to do with.
Sheldon's posture had shifted. The aloof set of his shoulders had softened almost imperceptibly. Behind his eyes, his remarkable brain was already building the picture — a boy in pajamas at a cluttered desk, a gamer in a beanbag chair, an eccentric billionaire surrounded by staff who didn't understand why he cared so much about physics. The images assembled themselves with the clarity his memory always provided.
The girls — the sleeping one, the little one, the future scientist — those he couldn't picture at all. That particular category of person remained entirely outside his frame of reference, and he was fine with that.
But the others were vivid. And they made the empty chairs in the garage feel less significant.
"That was surprisingly thoughtful," Juno said finally, looking at Adam.
"Don't make it weird," Adam said.
She smiled and looked back at her book.
He meant it, though. He wasn't performing sentiment. He'd watched this scene play out once before, in a different life, on a screen, and it had gotten to him then too. There was something about Sheldon — the genuine loneliness underneath all the armor, the way he was so thoroughly himself in a world that found that exhausting — that Adam had never been able to dismiss as just a character.
Besides, the wisdom points were only part of it. They'd been friends long enough now that Adam could admit, at least to himself, that Sheldon was actually his friend. An aggravating, condescending, deeply strange friend. But still.
Time Passes
1991 — Junior Year
Another year had moved through quickly.
Adam's grades sat consistently at the top of his class, carried by the steady climb of his intelligence and the discipline he'd maintained since freshman year. Hard Candy had settled into a comfortable mid-level reputation around school — not the sensation they'd been after homecoming, but a reliable presence with enough history to matter on a college application.
The Duncan household remained warm and occasionally chaotic, which Adam had come to actively appreciate.
The one stalled variable was Paige.
She lived across town, had minimal contact with Sheldon outside of university lectures, and essentially no contact with Adam. He'd been patient about it. Patient was all he could be.
Then one afternoon at lunch, Sheldon arrived with his brow furrowed.
"Paige is coming over this weekend," he said. "Her parents divorced. Her mother thinks I have a stabilizing influence on her and wants her to spend time here." He looked profoundly conflicted about all of this.
Adam kept his expression neutral.
There it is.
"She's going through a hard time," Adam said. "That's when friends show up. It's just what you do — it's basic social responsibility. You know that."
Sheldon looked pained but nodded. "I'm aware."
Weekend — The Cooper House
Adam arrived without being invited, which everyone had long since accepted as a thing that happened.
Paige was already there.
Her hair was different — darker, a little edged, the specific look of a teenager making an external change because the internal ones were harder to control.
Sheldon registered it immediately. "Why did you change your hair like that? Is it because of the divorce?"
"Shelly." Mary closed her eyes briefly.
"She just wanted a change," Paige's mother said, keeping her voice even. "And there's nothing wrong with that."
"I think it looks great," Mary said firmly, smiling at Paige.
After a few minutes, the mothers drifted into the kitchen, Missy pulled Paige toward the backyard with the specific energy of someone who treated every visitor as a potential friend, and Adam found himself with a small window of time and a question about how to use it.
End of Chapter 28
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