Chapter 1
MY FINGER TRACES THE same circle it always does.
Small, unhurried, moving along the margin of my notebook while Professor Salvatore’s voice fills the lecture hall like smoke.
Low, accented, a voice that makes two hundred students go quiet before he’s finished his first sentence.
I don’t have to look up to know every woman in this room has gone still.
I went still around this man two years ago and never quite figured out how to move again.
The circle widens. Tightens. Widens.
He’s talking about network security today.
How systems protect their most valuable assets by layering defenses, creating barriers between what matters and what wants to get in.
I should be taking notes. I’m taking notes, somewhere in the other half of my brain, the half that hasn’t been hijacked by the way his sleeves are rolled to the elbow and there’s a vein running along his forearm that I’ve been privately, mortifyingly aware of since September of my freshman year.
Two years. I’ve been quietly, hopelessly gone for this man for two years.
It’s not a crush. Crushes are what happened to me in seventh grade when Tommy Muldoon smiled at me during the hayride and I walked into a fence post. This is something else entirely.
Something with roots and weather patterns and a permanence that alarms me when I think about it too directly, so I mostly don’t.
I just sit in the third row every Tuesday and Thursday, draw my circles, and let his voice do what it does to the space between my ribs.
Nobody knows. Not David, who saves me a seat every lecture and has opinions about my coffee order.
Not my parents, who call every Sunday after church and would probably sell the other tractor if they thought it’d help.
Not even the cluster of women who trail Professor Salvatore around campus with their hungry eyes and lip gloss, the ones who show up to his lectures in heels and leave looking faintly devastated when he doesn’t glance their way.
I don’t wear heels. I wear a cotton dress my mother hemmed for me last Christmas, with small blue flowers on it, and flats that have seen better days.
I sit in the third row because I got here early on the first day of freshman year and the habit stuck.
I draw my circles and keep my hopeless, embarrassing, absolutely futile feelings to myself, because I’m Elsa Lively from Nebraska, and he’s Professor Luciano Salvatore, and the distance between those two facts is roughly the same as the distance between my parents’ cornfield and the moon.
My circle slows.
He’s moved to the front of the podium now, which he does when he’s about to make a point that matters.
No notes. He never uses notes. His lectures are built in real time, assembled from something inside his head that the rest of us can only try to keep up with.
His suit today is charcoal, cut so sharp it looks like it was made for the express purpose of ruining my concentration.
Which it wasn’t, obviously. He doesn’t dress for a twenty-year-old farm girl in the third row.
He dresses like a man who was raised to understand that clothing is armor, and his armor has never once had a seam out of place.
I know things about him. Small, collected things, gathered like blackberries. Carefully, one at a time, trying not to get scratched.
He drinks his coffee black. He arrives on campus before seven every morning because I saw him once from the library window, crossing the quad alone in the November cold.
His office smells like old books and something subtle and Italian.
Not cologne exactly, more like the memory of a place I’ve never been.
He doesn’t smile. Not ever. Not when a student makes a clever point, not when someone tries to flatter him, not when the department chair introduces him at events with a warmth he never returns.
I know this because I watch him. The way you watch a painting you love in a museum you can’t afford to visit twice. From a respectful distance. With the quiet understanding that this is as close as you’re ever getting, and that’s fine, that’s enough, that has to be enough.
My finger pauses. Restarts.
“Layered security isn’t about building one impenetrable wall.” His voice cuts through the low hum of two hundred laptops. A girl three seats to my left actually sighs. “It’s about creating a system of concentric barriers so that a breach of one layer doesn’t compromise the core.”
I write this down. Then I write, in the margin where my circles live: He’s talking about himself and doesn’t know it.
Then I scratch it out, because that would be very hard to explain if David leaned over to borrow my notes again.
David. I glance sideways. He’s doing that thing where he pretends to take notes but is actually ranking baseball players on the back of his syllabus.
His pen moves with the easy, unconcerned rhythm of someone who has never once lost sleep over a forearm vein.
I like David. He’s uncomplicated and kind and he carried my books across campus in the rain last week without being asked, which my father would approve of.
David Burnes is exactly the sort of boy a girl from Nebraska should have a crush on.
I look back at the podium. At the man who isn’t a boy, who isn’t from Nebraska, who isn’t uncomplicated or kind in any way that’s easy to name.
My circle tightens.
And then I see them.
At first, I think I’m wrong. The lecture hall is full, the back rows are always a sea of baseball caps and laptop screens, and my eyes shouldn’t be able to pick out two men in dark suits among two hundred students.
But they’re not students. They’re sitting too still, backs too straight, and their suits are wrong for campus.
Too expensive, too sharp, the fabric catching the fluorescent light differently than anything a graduate student could afford.
My finger stops.
Stops mid-circle, pressing into the paper hard enough to leave a dent.
Because I’ve seen those suits before.
Not these exact suits, maybe, but this exact quality.
This exact stillness. This exact way of sitting in a room that isn’t theirs, watching everything while appearing to watch nothing.
I saw it two years ago, in an alley off Lexington Avenue, on the worst night of my life and the night that saved it.
I was eighteen. Two weeks in New York. Still wearing my Nebraska like a neon sign.
The wrong shoes, the wrong bag, the trusting face of a girl who’d never been anywhere the sky wasn’t visible from every direction.
I had gotten off at the wrong subway stop and walked three blocks in the wrong direction, and then there were men, three of them, stepping out of a doorway with expressions that made every cell in my body go cold.
People think you scream. You don’t. My throat closed, my legs locked, and I remember thinking, in the clearest, most absurd moment of my life: Mama was right about the city.
Then: headlights. Black SUVs, two of them, appearing so fast they seemed to materialize from the asphalt itself.
Doors opening. Men in dark suits stepping out with a calm that was more terrifying than anything the men in the doorway had managed.
The alley emptied in seconds. The three men were gone.
Vanished. As though they’d never existed.
I stood there shaking, my back against the brick wall, my hands doing something I didn’t understand yet. Drawing circles against the rough surface, over and over, like if I just kept the motion going I could convince my body that I was still in one piece.
One of the suited men approached me.
“Our boss saw you were having trouble while we were stuck in traffic.”
That was all. They drove me home. I said thank you eleven times.
I counted, later, lying awake in my tiny apartment, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like Iowa.
They said nothing. They opened the car door for me and waited until I was inside my building and then they were gone, and I never saw them again.
Until now.
The two men at the back of the lecture hall. Sitting in perfect stillness. The same quality of suit. The same way of watching without appearing to watch.
My gaze travels from them to the podium. To the man standing there with his rolled sleeves and his voice that fills every corner of this room.
Our boss.
The floor shifts under me. Not literally. I’m sitting down, my feet are planted, my notebook is solid under my fingers. But something inside my inner ear recalibrates, like the moment a plane drops altitude and your stomach floats free of your body.
Professor Salvatore. The man I’ve been watching from the third row for two years. The man whose voice lives in my chest like a second heartbeat.
His men saved my life.
He saved my life.
My whole body has gone electric. My finger is frozen against the page, mid-circle, pressing so hard the paper’s going to tear.
Two years of collected details are running through this new understanding.
How he arrives before dawn. How even the other professors give him space.
His suits that fit like armor, his voice that never rises above a murmur.
The stillness. The composure that never, not once, cracks.
Oh, my stars.
It’s my mother’s phrase, and it rises in me unbidden, the way prayers do. Not willed, just there, pulled up from somewhere deeper than thought.
I think: I have to look normal. I have to sit here and look like a girl taking notes and not like a girl whose entire understanding of the world just turned inside out.
My circle won’t restart. My finger won’t cooperate.
David leans over. “You okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Fine,” I whisper. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone standing very far away. “Just thought I forgot to turn in an assignment.”