Chapter 4 The Morning After

He walked her back without making it an escort.

That was the first thing she caught. He fell into step beside her, not ahead, not behind, no hand at her back to steer her. He was just there, matching her pace on the path while the campus found its feet around them. The light had come up, but the people hadn't caught up to it. A few students crossed between buildings with their heads down and their coffee up, and none of them looked twice. She was grateful for that.

"You don't have to walk me back," she said.

"I know."

He kept walking. She kept walking. That was that.

The path from Aldenmere to Wren ran four minutes at a normal pace. They took it in six, slower than it needed to be, neither of them the one who'd chosen to slow it. She thought about the night before and made herself not think about it. She thought about the sound in the ground and made herself not think about that either. Her mind went to the letter instead, because it needed somewhere to go that wasn't the tree line.

The scholarship letter. She'd read it so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds. Full funding, housing, meals, and no catch anywhere in the fine print. She'd read the fine print twice, because there was always a catch. That was the first thing the placements taught you. The thing on the table and the thing being handed to you were never the same. A family took you in, and it was about the check that came with you. A teacher took an interest, and it was about how it looked to someone else. You learned to find the second reason under the first, and you learned it early.

She'd read the letter for the second reason and hadn't found one. She'd decided, in the end, that a door was sometimes just a door.

She was revising that.

"How long have you been at Ashveil?" she asked.

"Third year."

"Do you like it?"

He gave the question more thought than it needed. "It's where I need to be," he answered.

She looked at him sideways. "That's not what I asked."

The corner of his mouth moved. The near side of a smile, gone before she could be sure she'd seen it.

They reached Wren Hall. He stopped, so she stopped. The air between them rearranged itself. She let it and said nothing about it.

"Thank you," she said. "For the couch."

"Don't go back to the northwest boundary at night."

It came out flat, in the grey between an instruction and a warning. She held his eyes a moment.

"Okay," she said finally.

He nodded once and went. She watched him go for exactly as long as it took to notice she was watching, then turned and let herself in.

The room smelled like someone else's shampoo.

Her roommate sat cross-legged on the far bed with a bowl of cereal balanced on one knee. Red hair coming loose from a knot, green eyes cutting to the door the second it opened. Small, fair, built compact in a way you only caught when she moved, her whole body coiled to be ready. She looked up without surprise, like she'd been sitting there a while with a question and had gotten tired of holding it.

"Your bed wasn't slept in," she said as a matter of fact, devoid of accusation.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Mmm." She dug the spoon back into the bowl. Her face did everything out loud, every thought reaching the surface the moment she had it, and right now it hung between amusement and worry. "I'm Pip."

"Adaline."

"I know. The room assignment came with names on it." She tipped her head. "You look like someone who didn't sleep so much as get through the night."

"Do I?"

"Like this." Pip went still, eyes shut, chin tilted, and held it. It was close enough that something in Adaline's chest pulled tight.

"That's not unsettling at all," she said dryly.

Pip broke into a grin. "You're funny. I wasn't sure you'd be funny."

"I wasn't sure either." It came out before she could think it through, and it surprised her on the way. For a second, she let herself feel how easy it would be. A room with a person in it who made her laugh before breakfast, a version of this she got to keep. Then she set it down, the way she set most things down, because she'd learned not to unpack what she might have to leave.

She got her wash bag and towel and went down the hall. Underwater almost hot enough, she found herself back on the path. 

“It's where I need to be.” 

A non-answer from start to finish.

When she came back, Pip had moved to the desk and was doing something on her laptop that she closed in one smooth motion like it was a habit she had done a hundred times.

"Breakfast?" Pip nodded at a cereal box on the shelf over her books.

"I've got a lecture."

"You've got forty minutes." 

She ate standing, bowl in hand. Pip talked about the place like somewhere she'd chosen to love and had reasons for. The coffee from the cart outside the east building. The light in the library on winter afternoons. The dining hall putting out good soup every Thursday, for reasons nobody had cracked.

"What's in the northwest corner?" Adaline asked.

Pip's hand stopped on her phone. Half a second. Then she set it face down on the desk with a care the moment didn't call for.

"Trees.”

"I noticed."

"You should stay out of there." Her voice kept its ease, but underneath it, the ease had started working for a living. "At night, especially."

"Why?"

"Old campus thing." Pip picked the phone up, looked at it, and set it face up. Then she changed her mind and turned it over again. "Like not walking through the east archway before your first exam, or you'll fail. Every school's got them."

Adaline watched her do all of that with the phone.

"Right," she said, ending the conversation.

She rinsed the bowl, got her bag, and left for the lecture.

The hall was half full by the time she got there. A long tiered room, high windows, the acoustics built to carry one voice to the back row. She took a seat in the middle, off the back where you disappeared and the front where you signed up to be seen, where she could watch the whole room without joining any of it.

The lecture started. She took notes. The professor talked with his real interest buried three floors under the material he had to cover, and she followed him anyway, catching the thing under the thing he said.

She didn't see the note until she put her pen down.

It sat on the desk beside her hand. A square of folded paper that had not been there when she sat down. She was sure of it, sure from the same sense that tracked exits and who came through doors, a sense she never heard running and trusted anyway. She looked at it without touching it. The lecture went on around her. The student on her left highlighted a line. The one on her right slept with his eyes open, a trick she'd always envied.

She opened it under the desk.

Four words, in handwriting she didn't know. Small, even letters, made by someone taught to write rather than left to work it out.

“They know you're here.”

She read it twice. She folded it back along its creases and put it in her jacket pocket. She picked her pen up and finished the lecture. Her notes on the last twenty minutes came out as clean as the notes on the first forty, because coming apart in a lecture hall was not a thing she did, and because whatever this was could wait until she was outside.

The lecture ended. She filed out with the rest.

She stopped on the steps, the note between her fingers in her pocket, and worked out who to hand it to first.

Not Caelen. She didn't know enough about what he'd do with it.

Not Pip, who'd gone quiet at two words and closed her screen like a reflex. Pip knew more than she was saying.

She took her hand out of her pocket and went to find him.

Two years, and she had never had a reason not to trust him.

She did not know yet that this was the problem.