Margaret POV
October 1973
From the moment we brought him home, Andrei was… different.
Not in a bad way. Never that. But where Damien, our eldest, was a whirlwind of scraped knees, boisterous laughter, and a voice that carried through the house, Andrei was a pool of still water. At three years old, he watched the world with eyes that seemed to hold a century of thoughts. He was quiet, studious in a way that unnerved me, playing with wooden blocks not to build towers to knock over, but to arrange them in intricate, symmetrical patterns that felt more like Geometrical patterns than play.
He acted like he was carrying the world on his shoulders. My little boy.
When Daphne came along two years after Andrei, she filled the space Damien's chaos left with her own vibrant, demanding presence. She was sunshine and thunderstorms in a frilly dress, and she had everyone—Daniel, Damien, the nanny, me—wrapped securely around her tiny finger. We loved it. It felt normal.
Andrei's quietude did not.
Damien, born three years before Andrei, had been a challenge—a glorious, exhausting lesson in parenting. I'd feared having another like him, but this… this felt like an entirely different test. I wasn't worried about keeping up; I was worried about reaching in. I worried his silence was a wall, that his serious gaze meant unhappiness, that the world would see his difference and shun him for it.
"He's just thoughtful, love," Daniel would say, his tank-built frame looking oddly fragile when hunched in concern by the nursery door, watching Andrei methodically turn the pages of a picture book meant for children twice his age. "He's a Stevens. We're a stoic lot."
But the fear gnawed at me. I had always been the steady one, the calm in the storm. I was born Margaret O'Connell, third of seven on a sprawling corn farm in Indiana. With two older brothers and three younger siblings, chaos was my native language. I learned to manage it, to soothe and organize, because I wanted to help. I saw my parents' dreams for us—pursue what you love, we have the land to support it—and I chose economics, a tool to modernize our business.
That's where I met Daniel at the University of Illinois. He was pursuing a master's, heir to his family's mining and shipping concerns, with a quiet intensity that matched my own. I was enraptured. I was also terrified to tell my parents I wanted to marry an English industrialist and live an ocean away. Daniel had simply smiled, that rare, grounding smile. "Your family is wealthy in land, mine in capital. They'll be shocked by the distance, not the match."
He was right. Our wedding blended Indiana prairie and London formality beautifully. I moved to London, joined an agricultural research consultancy, determined to bridge my old world and my new one. Then came Damien. Then Andrei. Then Daphne.
The professional ambition dimmed beside the primal need to be present. I took a break. Now, I channeled that energy into a book—a practical guide to sustainable farming I hoped would help future generations. It was my anchor.
Yet, Andrei's anchor seemed to be somewhere deep inside him, unreachable.
My worries finally spilled over one evening. "Daniel, what if it's more? What if he's… struggling in there, and we can't see it?"
The fear in my voice erased his usual stoicism. He made discreet calls to old university friends with connections on Harley Street. A week later, we found ourselves in a warm, book-lined office across from Dr. Raymond Cattell, a renowned child psychologist.
Andrei sat perfectly still on the large chair, his legs dangling, observing Dr. Cattell with that unnerving, analytical calm.
After an hour of gentle conversation and simple puzzles that Andrei solved with silent, swift precision, Dr. Cattell leaned back.
"Mr. and Mrs. Stevens," he began, his tone neutral but his eyes sharp. "Andrei is exceptionally perceptive. His cognitive processing speed and pattern recognition appear… significantly advanced for his age. I suspect he has an above-average IQ. Quite substantially above average. I would recommend formal testing when he's a little older."
Relief washed over me, followed by a new wave of anxiety. "Is he… is that normal? Will he be alright?"
"The mind is as varied as the face, Mrs. Stevens. He is not unstable. He is likely bored. He requires intellectual engagement, not correction."
Daniel was quiet on the drive home, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. "They didn't declare him unstable, Meg," he finally said, voicing the fear he'd never admitted.
"They confirmed he's brilliant," I said, squeezing his arm, forcing my voice to be the steady one, even as my thoughts raced. How do we engage a mind like that? What does he need that we can't see?
I was at my desk by the bay window, the late afternoon London sun painting the room gold. I'd just finished a chapter on crop rotation cycles, the words flowing well. For a moment, the familiar calm of work settled me.
"Mom."
The voice was clear, quiet, and close. I turned.
Andrei stood there, four years old, his dark hair neatly combed, his eyes—Daniel's eyes, but so much older—fixed on mine. He held a simple drawing: a perfectly square box, with smaller boxes stacked neatly inside it, labelled in his careful, blocky print: GOAL, PATH, TOOLS.
"What do you need, honey?" I asked, my writer's mind idly noting the strange, architectural quality of his drawing.
"Mom," he said, his voice devoid of a child's whine, pure earnest inquiry. "When can I go and study in the library? The big one. With all the books."
The question was so specific, so deliberate. He didn't ask for toys or sweets. He asked for a library.
I smiled, the psychologist's words echoing. Bored. Requires engagement. "Soon enough, my love. When you're a bit bigger."
He nodded, a solemn, accepting gesture, as if he'd expected that answer. He didn't plead. He just looked at his drawing, then back out the window, as if consulting some internal schedule.
"Okay," he said simply. "Soon."
He walked back to his corner of the parlour, where his blocks were arranged not as a castle, but as a strange, sprawling map of interconnected nodes. He picked up a red block, studied it, and placed it deliberately at the center.
I watched him, my bright, quiet, mysterious boy. He wasn't staring into space. He was reading something. Planning something. I felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the draft from the window.
What are you building in there, Andrei?