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 theinside voicecode whenthey 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 thewedding, 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 youhelpedwith 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 foryou. 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.
