Tate collected the homework the next day. He flipped through Miles' pages, and his face twitched just for a second. Then he did something strange: before handing the stack to Caldwell, he pulled out his phone and took a photo of Miles' work. Quick. Quiet. Almost hidden. Miles didn't see it, but the camera saw everything.
Wednesday: Caldwell called Miles to the board in front of the class. She gave him a problem she knew he'd solve differently. He picked up the marker and started writing. His method? Modular arithmetic: clean reduction, elegant steps.
Halfway through, Caldwell cut him off. "Thank you, Miles, but let's see the correct approach."
She called Daphne up. Daphne solved the same problem using Caldwell's method: same answer, twice as many steps, but it was the approved way. Caldwell smiled at Daphne, then turned to the class. "This is what proper methodology looks like. Thank you, Daphne."
Miles walked back to his seat. The message was loud and clear: in this room, being right wasn't enough. You had to be right the way Caldwell wanted. And if you were Miles Montgomery, even that might not be enough.
That night, something cracked. Miles sat in his grandmother's kitchen, notebook open, pencil in hand, but he wasn't writing. He was just sitting there, staring at a blank page. For the first time since he was nine years old, Miles Montgomery didn't want to do math.
Grandma Ruth noticed. She always noticed. She didn't ask what happened, didn't push. She just set a plate of food in front of him and sat down across the table.
"You know what your granddaddy used to say?"
Miles looked up.
"They can change the rules. They can't change the answer."
Simple words, nothing fancy, but something behind Miles' eyes shifted. He looked at the blank page, picked up his pencil, and started writing.
That night, he did something he'd never done before: he went back through every exam Caldwell had given that semester and solved each one using her prescribed method, step by step, exactly the way she demanded.
And he found something.
On three of the five most recent exams, Caldwell's standard method produced answers that were approximations—close, but not precise. Rounding errors buried inside the process, small enough to pass, but not small enough to be correct. Miles' method on every single one produced exact answers: no rounding, no approximation, completely clean.