Been doing this book all on my own. It's done just doing some page formatting. Hopefully this weekend I'll be done.

Chapter 3
The Archaeologist Who Wasn’t Allowed to Dig

Dad never talked about the university unless something in the workshop broke.
It was like the two were connected—some invisible wire between a jammed gear and a memory he didn’t want to touch. The moment a machine sputtered or a circuit fried, he’d mutter something about “peer review” or “intellectual cowards” under his breath, then pretend he hadn’t said anything at all.
I learned more about his past from the things he didn’t say than the things he did.
Tonight, the workshop was quiet except for the hum of the house and the soft clink of tools as Dad rummaged through a drawer he’d already checked twice. He wasn’t looking for anything. He was stalling.
“You ever wonder why we live out here?” he asked finally.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
He huffed a laugh. “Every day.”
He pulled out a notebook—one of the old ones, the kind with frayed edges and coffee stains and pages so worn they looked like they’d been handled by a thousand hands instead of one. He flipped it open to a diagram of a stone structure I didn’t recognize. Angles. Measurements. Notes in his cramped, slanted handwriting.
“This,” he said, tapping the page, “is why.”
I studied the drawing. “It’s wrong.”
He blinked. “What?”
“The angle here,” I said, pointing. “It’s off by two degrees. And the base isn’t level. It’s compensating for a shift in the bedrock.”
Dad stared at me like I’d just recited a prophecy.
“That’s what I said,” he whispered. “Fifteen years ago. In a lecture hall full of people who thought they were smarter than me.”
He closed the notebook gently, like it was something fragile.
“They laughed,” he said. “Not even quietly. Full-on laughed. Said I was seeing patterns that weren’t there. Said I was trying to rewrite history because I couldn’t handle the real thing.”
He leaned back against the workbench, rubbing his temples.
“I wasn’t trying to rewrite anything,” he said. “I was trying to read it. Properly. The way it was meant to be read.”
I didn’t know what to say. Dad didn’t talk like this often—open, raw, unfiltered. It felt like watching a machine with no casing, all gears and wires exposed.
He picked up another notebook. This one was newer. Cleaner. He flipped to a page filled with sketches of ancient sites—pyramids, temples, monoliths. Lines connecting them. Ratios. Distances. Patterns.
“You see it, don’t you?” he asked.
I did. Instantly. The symmetry. The geometry. The impossible precision across cultures separated by oceans and millennia.
“It’s obvious,” I said.
Dad laughed again, but there was no humor in it this time.
“Obvious,” he repeated. “God, kid… if I’d had you in those lectures, they would’ve burned the university down before admitting I was right.”
He set the notebook aside and looked at me—really looked at me.
“You’re different,” he said softly. “Not in a bad way. Just… different.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. I never did when he said things like that.
To me, the world was simple. Patterns were patterns. Problems were problems. Solutions were just the natural end of a thought.
Dad sighed and pushed off the workbench, trying to shake off the heaviness.
“Anyway,” he said, forcing a smile, “that’s why we live out here. Easier to build things when no one’s trying to tell you you’re crazy.”
He walked toward the kitchen, mug in hand, humming off-key like he always did when he wanted to pretend everything was fine.
I stayed in the workshop, staring at the notebooks.
The angles. The ratios. The patterns.
They weren’t just similar.
They were identical.
And I didn’t know it yet, but everything Dad had been mocked for—everything he’d been exiled for—was about to be proven true.
Not by him.
By me.