Chapter 29: A Wake-Up Call
The Cooper Family Home
After turning it over in his head for a few minutes, Adam decided to go straight at it.
This was too rare an opportunity to waste on small talk. In the original timeline, Paige had drifted out of Sheldon's life entirely after this period — no further appearances, no footprint in the scientific community that Sheldon ever mentioned. For someone with her ability, that only meant one thing. She'd walked away from all of it and never looked back.
Adam wasn't going to let that be the whole story if he could help it.
"Paige." He sat down near her. "You don't have to do this."
Paige glanced at him. The look carried equal parts mockery and something more honest underneath. "I like how I look."
"Do you really?"
She held his gaze without flinching.
"What you actually like," Adam said, "is being the sharpest person in any room. You like physics and math and problems that don't have easy answers. You don't like this. You're just wearing it because something hurts and you don't know what else to do with that."
Paige's expression shifted. "So what if I'm smart? My parents never fought before we moved. Now they're divorced. Being ordinary sounds pretty good right now."
It was the most she'd spoken directly to him since they'd met. Adam registered that and kept going.
"Don't give yourself that much credit," he said. "Your parents' divorce wasn't because of you."
"You don't know that."
"You literally just used my own words back at me," Adam said. "Don't overestimate yourself."
She almost smiled. Didn't.
"I do know," he said. "My mom's a nurse. She sees families going through this constantly. You want to hear the actual logic? Your mom asked your dad to move for your schooling. Your dad lost his friend group and couldn't build a new one. Your mom was stretched thin between supporting your education and running the household. They argued. They divorced. You've constructed a sequence of events where you're the cause. But that sequence has a flaw."
"What flaw?"
"If they loved each other the way you think they did, they would have talked it through. People who are genuinely committed to each other don't fall apart over external pressure — they fall apart because the foundation was already cracked. The move didn't break them. It just made the cracks visible."
Paige was quiet.
"The divorce rate in this country is over fifty percent," Adam continued. "You think all of those marriages collapsed because of the kids? Your parents had a choice about how to handle every single thing that happened. They made their choices. That's on them, not you."
"You said my mother has started dating," Paige said suddenly, looking at him strangely. "I never told you that."
Adam caught himself. "Your mother came in today dressed carefully. She's not working. There was no occasion. I guessed."
Paige looked at him for a long moment. "She has."
"Right. So if the divorce was genuinely your fault — if it devastated her the way you're taking responsibility for — how has she already moved forward? People don't do that when they're destroyed. They do that when something that had already been dying finally ended."
Paige didn't answer. She was looking at the floor, thinking.
Adam kept his voice steady. "The way you're dressing right now, skipping your schoolwork, all of it — you think you're punishing someone. But who's actually paying the price?"
"Me," Paige said flatly. "I know that. I'm punishing myself."
"Same thing from the other direction," Adam said. "You think you're punishing yourself. But the people who care about you are watching, and they're worried, and they're hurting. Is that what you want?"
She was quiet for a long time.
When she looked up, her eyes were wet. "I'm going back and forth between two houses now. My grandma keeps saying things about my dad that I don't want to hear. I know I'm not doing well. I know everyone's worried. But I can't focus anymore. Everything that used to matter just — stopped mattering."
"You're lonely," Adam said.
He let that sit for a moment. Then, carefully: "What you need is a friend."
Paige looked — instinctively, without thinking about it — at Sheldon, who had been sitting nearby in a state of complete bewilderment for the past several minutes.
Adam did not sigh out loud.
"Yes," he said. "Friends. More than one, ideally. Your parents' situation is their situation. It happened. But think about what's actually in front of you now — two families, two sets of people who love you. That's more support than most people have, even if it doesn't feel like it right now."
"You're describing a fairy tale," Paige said.
"I know it's more complicated than that," Adam admitted. "But the complicated version still ends in the same place — your parents' marriage is their responsibility, not yours. You didn't cause it and you can't fix it. What you can do is decide whether you're going to let it take everything else away from you too."
He paused. "You're one of the most genuinely talented people I've ever encountered. Watching you disappear into this would be a real loss. Not for the scientific community, not for anyone else — for you. You'd be the one losing something."
Paige's expression was unreadable. But the wall had thinned.
Adam glanced sideways at Sheldon, who had been trying to follow the conversation with the focus of someone taking a foreign language exam.
"Sheldon," Adam said. "When a friend is having a hard time, what do you do?"
Sheldon thought about it with genuine seriousness. "Offer them a warm beverage?"
Adam looked back at Paige.
Something in her face broke open just slightly. She looked at Sheldon — at the complete earnestness of him, the total absence of performance — and laughed. A small one, real and unguarded.
"That actually sounds good," she said.
Ding!
Intelligence +6
End of Chapter 29
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