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)
He knew my order.
My circle, which had been tracing the rim of my coffee cup, stops.
The barista is wiping down the counter, not looking at me. His movements are competent, casual, unremarkable. Except for his shoes. His shoes are wrong. They’re too good for a campus barista, the leather too fine, and they’re the same quality as the shoes on the man with the newspaper, the man at the library, the man outside the dining hall.
I pick up my coffee. Take a sip. It’s perfect. Exactly the way I like it, which is information I’ve never shared with anyone at this counter because I’m from Nebraska and we don’t make complicated coffee orders, we just say latte, please and accept whatever arrives.
He looked up my order. Or he watched me order it. Or someone told him.
By all rights, I should mind.
Another sip. Thesis document open. Not minding at all.
THE EMAIL ARRIVES AT 4:17 PM.
Dear Miss Lively,
I would like to schedule a brief meeting to discuss your academic progress and the status of your scholarship review. Please report to my office at your earliest convenience, and no later than end of day Friday.
Warm regards, Professor Agnes Cuthbert Department Chair
I read it twice. Three times. The words are perfectly polite. Perfectly professional. Academic progress. Scholarship review. Nothing in this email would raise a flag with anyone who didn’t know that my scholarship has been in good standing since freshman year, that my GPA hasn’t dipped below a 3.8, that my thesis advisor submitted a glowing progress report last month.
But I know.
I know because warm regards from Professor Cuthbert is the academic equivalent of a knife wrapped in silk. I know because she’s the department chair and she controls my scholarship and my thesis committee and my entire academic future, and the timing of this email, three days after I was seen leaving Luciano Salvatore’s office at half past four in the afternoon, isn’t a coincidence.
My finger presses flat against my laptop trackpad. No circle. Just pressure.
I read the email one more time. The last line snags on something, a thorn I almost missed:
I trust you understand the importance of maintaining the standards that earned you your place here. It’d be a shame for any... external distractions to compromise what I’m sure is a very promising future.
External distractions.
I close the laptop. My coffee has gone cold. The barista who isn’t a barista is watching me from behind the counter, and for the first time since I started spotting Luciano’s men around campus, their presence doesn’t feel like warmth.
It feels like proof.
Proof that someone else noticed too.
Chapter 4
“YOUR FRAMEWORK IS too narrow.”
I sit up straighter at his words, my fingers tightening around the edges of my thesis proposal, and it’s late afternoon, the office warm and amber, and I’m trying, I’m genuinely trying, to care more about his academic criticism than about the way this hour makes him look like something painted by a Renaissance master who believed in suffering.
“It’s not too narrow,” I say. “It’s focused.”
“It’s limited.”
“There’s a difference.”
His eyebrow lifts. One fraction of an inch. I’ve never seen him do that before, and the novelty of it is so startling that I almost forget we’re arguing in his office at golden hour while the building empties around us, the hallway sounds thinning to scattered footsteps and the click of distant doors. I shouldn’t be here. Agnes Cuthbert’s email is sitting in my inbox like a lit match, and the smart thing, the safe thing, would be to keep my head down and my circles to myself and stop showing up in this man’s office with my heart doing things my brain hasn’t approved.
And yet.
“My thesis is about building affordable inventory management systems for small farms.” I lean forward. My proposal is covered in his handwriting, sharp red annotations that I’ve been staring at for twenty minutes, and some of them are wrong. I know they’re wrong. He’s brilliant about networks and encryption and the architecture of systems that protect against breach, but he doesn’t know anything about farming, and I do. “The whole point is that it’s narrow. Small farms don’t need enterprise-level solutions. They need something they can run on a ten-year-old laptop while they’re tracking seed stock and counting heads of cattle.”
“And your security model for that system is nonexistent.”
“Because the security model comes later. You can’t secure a system that doesn’t work yet, and right now the system doesn’t work because every existing platform assumes a budget that—”
“Miss Lively.”
“—a budget that small operations don’t have, which is why I’m proposing a modular approach that scales with the user’s actual inventory needs rather than imposing a top-down architecture that—”
“Miss Lively.”
“—requires infrastructure that doesn’t exist in rural Nebraska, and I know that because my parents’ farm still uses a paper ledger and a spreadsheet my father built in 1998, and it took me three summers to convince him that a laptop wouldn’t make the corn grow sideways, so when you tell me my framework is too narrow, Professor, with all due respect—”