He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

Hugh put his hand on Lewis’s arm, stilling it mid-equation. “Maybe I said that wrong. We need you to take time off.”

Lewis stared at him. “Oh. Um. I see,” he said, although he didn’t. If Lewis was willing to segregate his work life from his home life, why couldn’t Sterling College do the same?

Unless.

Had that been his mistake in the first place? If you were uncertain in the decisions you made as a father, could you patch over your insecurities with the confidence you had as a professional? Or would the fix always be flimsy, a paper wall that couldn’t bear weight?

“It’s just for a bit,” Hugh said. “It’s what’s best.”

For whom? Lewis thought, but he remained silent until he heard Hugh close the door behind himself on his way out.

When the chairman was gone, Lewis lifted the chalk again. He stared at the equations until they melded together, and then he began to scrawl furiously, a composer with a symphony moving too fast for his fingers. Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation divided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation.

Lewis stepped back from the blackboard, surveying his handiwork. Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.

He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

And that made Lewis think of his son.

He stood in front of the blackboard and started to cry, his hands and his sleeves covered in fine white chalk dust, as if he had become a ghost.

The office of the Geek Squad, as Patrick affectionately referred to the tech guys who hacked into hard drives to find proof of pornography and downloads from The Anarchist Cookbook, was filled with computers. Not just the one seized from Peter Houghton’s room, but also several from Sterling High, including the one from the secretary’s main office and another batch from the library.

“He’s good,” said Orestes, a tech that Patrick would have sworn was not old enough to have graduated from high school himself. “We’re not just talking HTML programming. Guy knew his shit.”

He pulled up a few files from the bowels of Peter’s computer, graphics files that didn’t make much sense to Patrick until the tech typed a few buttons and suddenly a three-dimensional dragon appeared on the screen and breathed fire at them. “Wow,” Patrick said.

“Yeah. From what I can tell, he actually made up a few computer games, even posted them for gamers on a couple of sites where you can do that and get feedback.”

“Any message boards on those sites?”

“Dude, give me an iota of credit,” Orestes said, and he clicked onto one he’d already flagged. “Peter went by the screen name DeathWish. They’re a-”

“-band,” Patrick finished. “I know.”

“They’re not just a band,” Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “They’re the modern voice of the collective human conscience.”

“Tell that to Tipper Gore.”

“Who?”

Patrick laughed. “She was before your time, I guess.”

“What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?”

“The cavemen, banging rocks together,” Patrick said dryly.

The screen filled with a series of posts from DeathWish. Most of them were entries about how to enhance a certain graphic or reviews of other games that had been posted on the site. Two quoted lyrics from the band Death Wish. “This is my personal favorite,” Orestes said, and he scrolled down.

From: DeathWish

To: Hades 1991

This town blows. This weekend there is a craft festival where old bags come to show off the ticky tacky shit they made. They should call it a CRAP festival. I’m gonna hide in the bushes outside the church. Target practice as they cross the street-ten points each! Yee ha!

Patrick leaned back in the chair. “Well, that doesn’t prove anything.”

“Yeah,” Orestes said. “Craft festivals do kind of suck. But check this out.” He swiveled in his own chair to reach another terminal, set up on a table. “He hacked into the school’s secure computer system.”

“To do what? Change his grades?”

“Nope. The program he wrote broke through the firewalls on the school system at 9:58 a.m.”

“That’s when the car bomb went off,” Patrick murmured.

Orestes pivoted the monitor so that Patrick could see. “This was on every single screen on every single computer at the school.”

Patrick stared at the purple background, the flaming red letters that scrolled like a marquee: READY OR NOT…HERE I COME.

Jordan was already sitting at the table of the conference room when Peter Houghton was brought in by a correctional officer. “Thanks,” he said to the guard, his eyes on Peter, who immediately canvassed the room, his gaze lighting on the only window. Jordan had seen this over and over in prisoners he’d represented-an ordinary human could so quickly turn into a caged animal. Then again, it was a chicken-and-egg conundrum: were they animals because they were in jail…or were they in jail because they were animals?

“Have a seat,” he said, and Peter remained standing.

Unfazed, Jordan started talking. “I want to lay out the ground rules, Peter,” he said. “Everything I say to you is confidential. Everything you say to me is confidential. I can’t tell anyone what you say. I can tell you, however, not to talk to the media or the police or anyone else for that matter. If anyone tries to contact you, you contact me immediately-call me collect. As your lawyer, I get to do the talking for you. From now on, I’m your best friend, your mother, your father, your priest. Are we clear on that?”

Peter glared at him. “Crystal.”

“Good. So.” Jordan pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase, a pencil. “I imagine you’ve got a few questions; we can start with those.”

“I hate it here,” Peter burst out. “I don’t get why I have to stay here.”

Most of Jordan’s clients started out quiet and terrified in jail-which quickly gave way to anger and indignation. But at that moment Peter sounded like any other ordinary teenage kid-like Thomas had sounded at his age, when the world apparently revolved around him and Jordan just happened to be living on it as well. However, the lawyer in Jordan trumped the parent in him, and he started to wonder if Peter Houghton truly might not know why he was in jail. Jordan would be the first to tell you insanity defenses rarely worked and were grossly overrated, but maybe Peter could be passed off as the real deal-and that was the key to securing an acquittal. “What do you mean?” he pressed.

“They’re the ones who did this to me, and now I’m the one who’s being punished.”

Jordan sat back and crossed his arms. Peter didn’t feel remorse for what he’d done, that much was clear. In fact, he considered himself a victim.

And here was the remarkable thing about being a defense attorney: Jordan didn’t really care. There was no room in his line of work for his own personal feelings. He had worked with the scum of the earth before-killers and rapists who fancied themselves martyrs. His job wasn’t to believe them or to pass judgment. It was simply to do or say whatever he had to in order to get them free. In spite of what he’d just told Peter, he was not a clergyman or a shrink or a friend to a client. He was simply a spin doctor.