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Missy screamed. Not from fear—from annoyance. “I was about to win level seven!”

When the power returned at 10:17, everyone cheered. But Sheldon stayed outside another hour, watching the jar, realizing that some experiments—like siblings, or blackouts, or fireflies—didn’t need a hypothesis.

“Can your statistics unburn my pizza?” Georgie asked, fanning the smoke detector with a National Geographic .

Missy grabbed the flashlight. “I’m using this to find cookies.”

“For your data,” she said.

Outside, the stars blazed like someone had polished each one. Sheldon set up a makeshift observation station on the driveway—a lawn chair, his notebook, and a thermos of warm milk (which he called “night coffee”).