They competed because they loved problems.
Not trophies.
By seventeen, both had accumulated enough regional medals to fill a drawer.
I didn’t display them.
They didn’t want me to.
“Feels weird,” Nathan once said.
“Like a shrine to ourselves.”
So the medals remained in a shoebox beside old cables.
That was who my sons were.
Which made what happened at the state championship even more unexpected.
Because apparently, while I had spent years trying not to make their lives about Michael…
they had quietly been investigating him.
3
The competition lasted all day.
Noah’s category—Applied Mathematics—was scheduled first.
Nathan’s Physical Sciences examination began twenty minutes later.
Parents were not allowed inside testing rooms, so I spent the morning wandering through exhibits and drinking terrible convention-center coffee.
I saw Michael repeatedly.
That was difficult to avoid.
His foundation was one of the event sponsors.
HARTLEY EDUCATION FOUNDATION appeared on banners, programs, projection screens, even the lanyards around volunteers’ necks.
