Chapter 4 #2
“I don’t understand it,” I whispered finally, the words barely audible. “Something about him lingers. It settles beneath my skin and refuses to leave.”
Aster rested her head lightly against my shoulder, her tone softer now. “Then maybe stop fighting it,” she said. “Or at least distract yourself. Let’s get another coffee before next class. You’ll feel better.”
I stared across the courtyard, the frost catching light in delicate shards, the weight of his voice still somewhere inside me. “Maybe,” I murmured, though even I didn’t believe it.
I nodded, though a thought pressed quietly against the edges of my mind, persistent and unwelcome.
What if this wasn’t something I could simply shake off?
What if the problem wasn’t that Professor Hayden had unsettled me, but that the feeling he left behind refused to fade, an irritation buried just deep enough to linger.
Aster nudged Gwen with her elbow, her tone deceptively casual. “Hey. Can you ask Zayn to do a little… digging?”
Gwen blinked, suspicion tugging at her expression. “Digging?”
“You know. A light background check. Nothing sinister. Just, academic curiosity,” Aster said, twirling her straw between her fingers with the calm of someone pretending she wasn’t plotting an investigation.
I gave her a look. “You want to stalk our professor?”
Aster smiled sweetly. “Not stalk. Investigate.”
“Those are synonyms.”
Gwen leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand, a small smile pulling at her lips. “You mean Professor Stone?”
“Obviously,” Aster replied, her tone syrupy. “Edwina’s favorite antagonist.”
I groaned softly. “He’s not my antagonist. He’s just—”
“—an emotionally detached, unfairly attractive academic disaster,” Gwen finished for me, her grin growing smug. “Got it.”
“Gwen,” I said flatly, but she only lifted her brows higher.
“Look, if Aster asks, I’ll at least mention it to Zayn. You know how he gets when there’s a mystery to solve.”
Aster leaned in, the spark of mischief brightening her features. “And Professor Stone is absolutely a mystery. An arrogant, reclusive, probably-haunts-his-own-office kind of mystery.”
Gwen chuckled, but her voice softened. “Relax. Zayn wouldn’t cross any lines. He just has a talent for finding information quickly.”
“Right,” I muttered. “Because being a master’s student in computer science wasn’t impressive enough, he had to be gifted in digital trespassing too.”
“He’s not a hacker,” Gwen protested, feigning offense. “He’s just…creatively skilled with systems that are meant to be locked.”
Aster snorted. “He hacked into the parking database last semester so we wouldn’t get ticketed.”
Gwen smirked. “That wasn’t hacking. That was love.”
Despite myself, I laughed under my breath. “You’re both unbelievable.”
Aster tilted her head, eyes gleaming. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re just afraid of what he’ll find.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but nothing came.
Because she wasn’t entirely wrong. Beneath the irritation, beneath the exhaustion of the morning, there was something else, something quieter.
A trace of unease. Not about what I already knew of Professor Stone, but about what I didn’t.
There was an edge to him, hidden under all that composure, something that felt too controlled to be entirely whole.
Gwen reached into her bag and pulled out her phone, her voice light. “I’ll text him. Just tell me what to send, name, department, and how much digging you want.”
Aster leaned back with a grin that could only mean trouble. “Everything. Academic records, publications, social media, exes, secret families, any suspicious disappearances—”
“Aster.”
She raised her hands. “Kidding. Mostly.”
I sighed, rubbing at my temple. “Fine. Just ask him to keep it subtle.”
Gwen was already typing, her nails clicking lightly against the screen. “Subtlety is Zayn’s version of affection.”
As she hit send, a faint chill crept up the back of my neck, a mix of guilt and something more difficult to name.
I told myself it was harmless curiosity.
That I didn’t actually care what he’d find.
That this was just Aster’s mischief spiraling out of hand.
But as the three of us sat there, coffee cooling in our cups and the winter sun spilling weak light across the courtyard, a quieter truth settled in the pit of my stomach.
I did care. And I didn’t know why.
By the time our last class ended, the sun was already sinking behind the city skyline, painting the clouds in bruised shades of burnt peach and rose ash. The cold had settled deeper into my coat, clinging to the fabric until it felt woven into me, and every breath came out sharp enough to sting.
“Movie night,” Aster announced, slipping her arm through mine as we crossed the lot. “Your place. I’m bringing popcorn. Gwen’s bringing chocolate. You—” she glanced at me with raised brows, “—are bringing your dreadful taste in cinema.”
“I have excellent taste,” I countered, tugging my scarf higher against the wind.
“You cried at Howl’s Moving Castle.”
“It was emotionally profound.”
“It was animated.”
“And you wept through that horror movie about a possessed mirror.”
“That mirror was cursed,” she said with perfect solemnity. “There’s a difference.”
Gwen appeared by the car, her cheeks flushed pink from the cold, arms already overloaded with snacks. “No fighting,” she said lightly. “Or at least wait until the third act.”
We drove back to my apartment in the kind of gentle silence that doesn’t feel heavy, only earned.
The hum of the tires against the road became its own rhythm, soft and steady, and every dip and turn seemed to lull the world into stillness.
Aster was behind the wheel, humming under her breath, while Gwen sat in the passenger seat, halfway through a bag of crisps and unapologetic about it.
I sat in the backseat, hands folded tightly in my lap, eyes fixed on the passing glow of streetlights.
I didn’t speak. I rarely did in cars. Even now—after years—something about being enclosed in that confined space still made my chest tighten.
I hid it well, the quiet panic that pressed at the edges of memory.
But sometimes, when the world outside blurred too fast or the brakes caught too suddenly, the ghost of that night stirred beneath my ribs.
The echo of twisted metal. The silence that came before the screaming.
The way the air had turned too thick to breathe.
Even now, with friends beside me and warmth wrapped around my shoulders, the memory still moved beneath the surface, an old scar pulsing in time with the city lights.
By the time we reached my building, the streetlamps burned low, casting long pools of gold across the wet pavement.
My apartment greeted us in soft familiarity, a space small but lived-in, its walls lined with precarious towers of books and half-filled mugs of forgotten tea.
A lavender candle flickered faintly on the coffee table, perfuming the air with the subtle sweetness of calm and memory.
We dropped onto the couch in a tangle of limbs and laughter, the kind of exaggerated exhaustion only university students and fictional heroines could perfect.
The opening credits had barely begun when Gwen’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, her smile faltering. Then she froze.
“It’s from Zayn,” she said quietly.
Aster sat up immediately. “Tell me he found something.”
Gwen nodded, her eyes scanning the screen. “He sent a file. Looks detailed.”
Something tightened low in my stomach, a strange mix of unease and anticipation coiling together until I couldn’t tell one from the other. Gwen opened the attachment, the pale glow of her phone washing softly across her face as her eyes moved over the screen.
“Okay,” she said finally, her tone shifting. “Here’s what we’ve got.”
She paused, her tone shifting, curiosity threading through each word.
“Name: Hayden Everett Stone. Born in Connecticut. Birthday, February second. Which
means…he’s an Aquarius. Naturally cursed. Undergraduate at Princeton. Master’s and PhD at Oxford. Taught at Cambridge for a while. Then transferred here six months ago. Before that, a short-term position at some private institute in Boston. Everything polished. Perfectly arranged. Too much so.”
Aster arched a brow. “So he’s a genius wanderer. Got it.”
Gwen scrolled further, her expression tightening. “Except…that’s where it stops.”
I leaned forward. “Stops how?”
“I mean, there’s nothing else,” she said, the edge in her voice sharpening with disbelief. “No personal data. No social media accounts. No mention of family anywhere. No photos apart from his faculty portrait. And here, Zayn left a note. Look.”
She turned the phone toward us. The glow cast faint halos across our faces as she read.
‘There’s a two-year gap between his last documented position and his arrival at the university. No trace of digital activity during that time. No forwarding address. No publications. No conference appearances. No lectures. Nothing. It’s as if he ceased to exist.’
A shiver moved down my spine, subtle but certain. Gwen’s thumb hovered over the next line.
‘That kind of silence doesn’t happen by accident. Either he erased it himself, or someone erased it for him. I’ll dig deeper.’
Gwen’s voice softened, though the words felt heavier for it. “Zayn says it’s strange. Even private people leave patterns, footprints, fragments, something. But this? It doesn’t fucking exist.”
Aster leaned back slowly, her expression stripped of its earlier amusement. “Okay. That’s…unnerving.”
The room quieted. Not the kind of lull that comes after laughter, but a dense, motionless stillness that carried its own gravity. It settled into the corners, pressed against the windows, and lingered over us with a weight that didn’t feel empty, only watchful.
I stared down at my hands, my fingers curled into pale crescents against my knees, then flexed them as if I might uncover an answer hidden in my skin.
The tension that had followed me all day hummed again beneath the surface, steady and insistent, until it found its voice in the truth I’d been avoiding.
There was something about Hayden Stone that didn’t fit the world he occupied. Something that resisted belonging.
It wasn’t mere distance or coldness, that would have been easy to explain, a defense anyone could recognize.
This was something far more deliberate in its construction, a silence shaped into armor.
He carried the stillness of a man who had built walls out of discipline and buried whatever human remnants remained behind them.
And sitting there, half-drowned in candlelight and the muted flicker of the television, I began to see the edges of the picture more clearly.
The tailored suits, the flawless credentials, the immaculate phrasing and composed demeanor, all of it was seamless, almost too seamless.
The perfection felt wrong, carefully arranged to conceal something fractured beneath the surface, the way a beautiful portrait might hang just slightly askew to draw your eyes away from the crack in the wall behind it.
“Maybe he just took a sabbatical,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. The words tasted hollow the moment they left my mouth.
Aster didn’t look away from the screen. “Sabbaticals don’t erase an entire digital footprint.”
Her tone was quiet, but it cut through the silence with unsettling precision. Gwen didn’t answer at first. She just stared at her phone, her features shadowed, her expression veiled by something I couldn’t read.
“Zayn said he’ll dig more tonight,” Gwen murmured finally, her voice carrying the weight of something she didn’t want to name.
I nodded, slow and unfocused, my thoughts blurring at the edges.
The light from her phone washed over the ceiling, casting restless shapes that trembled and reformed, shadows breathing without life.
The scent of butter and salt still hung in the air, faintly sweet and heavy, but I couldn’t taste it.
My senses felt suspended, dulled beneath that cold pull coiling around my spine.
All I could think about was that empty space in his history — those two years that had simply vanished.
Two years. Gone without a trace, sealed in silence.
A void where a life should have been.
The thought crawled under my skin, threading through me with a strange, insistent chill. What kind of man leaves no trail? Who disappears so completely that even the digital world refuses to remember him?
Hayden Stone, the man who moved through corridors as if the ground adjusted to his steps, who carried silence with the authority of ritual, who spoke with such deliberate control that every syllable landed like a decree.
He wasn’t the type to drift. Everything about him suggested structure, discipline, permanence.
And yet somewhere between Cambridge and Greystone, the record of his existence had been erased.
My mind refused to let go of the question twisting at its center.
Why would a man like him, educated in places that made the world listen, refined by institutions built on centuries of arrogance and ambition, end up here?
Not at Oxford. Not in Boston. Not in the orbit where his name belonged easily.
Here, in a modest university tucked behind government buildings and empty streets, surrounded by students who barely grasped his language.
Men like him didn’t fall. They withdrew.
And as that thought settled, cold and certain, something darker followed it. A realization I didn’t want to believe but couldn’t unhear.
He hadn’t come here to teach. He had come to disappear.
And somewhere beneath the curiosity, beneath the faint ache of irritation, beneath the echo of his voice that still refused to fade, something far quieter began to move inside me — a tremor I couldn’t reason away.