Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
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.”
He accepts this. David always accepts things. It’s one of the nicest and most occasionally frustrating things about him.
I look back at the podium. Professor Salvatore is writing something on the board now, his back to the hall, his handwriting angular and European in a way that has caused me a truly embarrassing amount of private distress. His shoulders are straight. His posture carries an authority that has nothing to do with academia and everything to do with whatever made those men jump out of their SUVs on a Tuesday night for a stranger in an alley.
My circles used to be peaceful. A thinking habit, something my hands did while my mind wandered through cornfields and daydreams and the quiet fantasies of a girl too sensible to ever act on them.
Right now my circles aren’t peaceful. Right now my finger is pressed against the margin of my notebook and I’m not drawing anything at all.
He turns back to face the hall.
Two hundred students look at him the way they always do, that blend of fear and fascination that follows him through every room he enters. The girl three seats left has given up pretending to take notes. A boy in the front row is sitting up straighter.
But I’m not looking at him the way I always do.