2.The Boy with No One
646 Words
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Chapter Two: The Boy with No One
The next morning, Isa didn’t attend a single meeting. She left the mansion in a plain black hoodie and sunglasses, trying to outrun her own name. No driver. No assistant. Just her and the wheel.
She didn’t know where she was going until she arrived.
A quiet bookstore café on the edge of the city. It wasn’t flashy. No one inside recognized her. It smelled like cinnamon and old pages, and for the first time in weeks, she could breathe.
She ordered black coffee and sat in the farthest corner, where the world couldn’t find her.
That’s when she saw him.
He was at the window seat, a paperback balanced on one knee, a laptop glowing dimly beside him. Tall, almost too lean, with delicate features that looked like they’d been drawn in silence. Jet black hair fell messily over his forehead, half hiding his long-lashed eyes.
He looked...young.
And broken.
Maybe that’s why she couldn’t stop watching him. Because he looked like what she felt.
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His name was Alexander. She heard it when the barista called him to pick up his tea—green, no sugar.
He didn’t thank her. Didn’t look up. Just returned to his seat, shoulders hunched like he was trying to fold himself into invisibility.
Isa watched the way he scrolled through lines of code on his laptop with inhuman speed. His fingers moved like a concert pianist’s, yet his eyes never held confidence. Instead, they flicked back and forth, as if waiting to be judged.
After an hour, curiosity tugged harder than restraint. She walked over.
“Is that Python?” she asked, nodding toward his screen.
He froze. His eyes darted to hers, startled. Like he wasn’t used to being spoken to.
“Uh… yes,” he said softly. His voice was almost a whisper. “Machine learning simulation.”
Isa smiled. “You're optimizing a neural net... but you're skipping second-layer weight decay. That’s why it's overfitting.”
He blinked, stunned. “You—understand this?”
She chuckled. “I wrote code like that before your generation learned to type.”
A pause.
Then, the faintest twitch of his lips. A ghost of a smile.
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They talked.
For minutes. Then an hour.
She learned that Alexander Blake was only twenty. A genius. IQ of 200. Self-taught since he was eleven. His mother died when he was seven. Father disappeared a year later. Foster care ever since. Never adopted.
Never wanted.
He lived alone in a rented studio above a garage. Worked night shifts online as a freelance developer to afford textbooks. Never had real friends. Never trusted anyone.
“I don’t… talk to people usually,” he admitted, eyes downcast. “They say I talk too fast. Or too slow. Or not at all.”
“You talk just fine,” Isa said quietly.
“But you’re Isa Martin,” he said, almost defensively. “Why are you even talking to me?”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“Because you're the first person I’ve met in years who isn’t pretending.”
His lips parted slightly, as if he didn’t know whether to smile or apologize.
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Before she left, she wrote her number on a napkin.
“If you ever want help with that model—or just someone to talk to.”
He took it like it was glass.
She walked out into the evening light feeling something she hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Not hope exactly.
But a spark of connection. A thread between two very different kinds of lonely.
And somewhere in a corner of that quiet bookstore, a boy with a world-class mind and shattered self-worth watched the door she had exited through...
...and for the first time in a decade, wished someone would come back.
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- Writer
