Why he found them didn’t matter—whether he’d come looking for money, a home-cooked meal, wifely duties fulfilled. To gloat over some new family he’d forged, maybe, or chastise her over their sissy of a son. To spout more of his hateful venom, the kind that used to poison every meal they ate together: that the Germans had some good ideas, the jobs of hard workers like himself needed protection, his family came over the right way and America had no room for more. He’d found them again, and because Liam had let his guard down, because he’d dared to believe he was in control, it was ripped away from him once more.

You’ll need someone to care for her. A grown-up, the doctor stressed, looking him over in his ill-fitting suit. So he made the arrangements, reaching for his slender wallet with numb fingers. Moved them both to a rented room in Princeton, just a few blocks from campus. Divvied up his food stipend, added a few hours to his library shifts. The numbers still wouldn’t add up.

He missed a week of classes curled up on the chairs of the hospital waiting room and steering his mother into their new life, even more hidden than the one before. He lived at the library then as he tried to catch up, building formulas and hypotheses into a wall between him and the world. Anything not to go back to that rented room, that stare.

Quantum mechanics, atomic weights, neutron signaling, dimensional shift. Dark matter flowing away, that mysterious negative sign in the universe’s weight, throwing off everything he tried to compute. Dark matter seeping into the cracks and corners all around him, sticky as tar. Energy was neither created nor destroyed. It had to go somewhere.

And if it entered their universe, then surely it could be used.

He turned in his missed schoolwork and then some as he poked and poked at his formulas’ holes. Turned seventeen. Hired a day nurse. Picked up a shift at the maintenance facility on campus, hauling heavy things around, throwing them down. Soon his shoulders pushed at the seams of the suit jackets that used to swallow him whole. And all the while, he worked numbers at the library from his position at the circulation desk.

The world beyond the library windows was black, a sea of ink, as night pressed in. After midnight no one bothered him. The stacks were his. In there, his theories made more sense than his reality, and he never wanted to leave.