When he returned to the hotel, drained but quietly hopeful, Andrew was finishing a video call.
“How’d it go?”
“I think well,” Noah said. “Maybe very well.”
Andrew nodded toward Lily, who was playing with stacking cups on the rug. “Good. Because for the next two hours, I need your miracle hands again.”
What surprised Noah was how much he enjoyed the rhythm that emerged between them. Competition in the mornings and early afternoons. Lily during Andrew’s meetings. Study in the evenings. Sometimes room service dinners. Sometimes quick conversations about business, mathematics, communities, or the strange shapes that opportunity takes.
Noah found that caring for Lily calmed him before each round. He counted blocks with her, arranged soft toys into patterns, and laughed when she knocked over everything he built. Andrew, watching once from the doorway before a meeting, said, “You teach math to babies too?”
“Start early,” Noah replied.
On the second day, the competition shifted to collaborative problem solving. Noah’s team included students from Japan, Germany, and Brazil. At first he worried that he would be the least formally trained of the four.