Chapter 3: The Alcove

## Emily

September 8th, 2021

There was a place in the East Wing that nobody knew about.

Not nobody — that was dramatic. The janitors knew. The maintenance guys who came to fix the heating vents every November knew. And one raccoon had definitely known, because I'd found its droppings behind the radiator during sophomore year and had to have a very serious conversation with myself about whether I was willing to share my hiding spot with a feral animal.

The raccoon won. I cleaned up after it. We coexisted for three months until it disappeared — moved on to better opportunities, presumably, because even raccoons had more ambition than I did.

The alcove was on the third floor of the East Wing, past the music rooms that nobody used after 4 PM and through a door that was supposed to be locked but hadn't been since 2018. It was a strange little pocket of space — a wide windowsill below a stained-glass window that someone had installed in the 1940s and then forgotten about. The window depicted a woman holding a book, which seemed on-brand for a university. The glass turned the afternoon light into patches of amber and blue and blood-red that moved across the floor like slow-motion fireworks.

I'd been coming here since freshman year.

It was the only place on campus where the noise stopped. Not just the external noise — the students, the announcements, the perpetual construction on the new science building — but the internal noise. The grinding, relentless monologue in my skull that narrated my failures on a loop. You should have gone with them. You said no. They're dead because you said no. You're alive because you were lazy and selfish and now you're here and they're not and every breath you take is a breath they can't—

In the alcove, that voice got quieter. Not silent. Never silent. But quieter.

I'd been eating lunch here for three semesters. Ash knew where it was. Syn had been here once, for a nap during finals week. That was it. My kingdom. Population: one depressed woman and the ghost of a raccoon.

Until the second week of September, when the door opened and the kingdom was invaded.

I was lying on the windowsill with my headphones in, a granola bar resting on my chest, and my eyes closed. The Doctor Who soundtrack was playing — the Eleventh Doctor's theme, all violins and wonder and the kind of optimism I could only access through other people's music. Charlie's bear was tucked under my arm. My feet were bare because I'd kicked off my shoes an hour ago and the stone floor was cool and perfect.

The door creaked.

I didn't move. Didn't open my eyes. If it was a janitor, they'd leave. If it was a student, they'd take one look at the clearly unhinged woman using a windowsill as a bed and retreat. Either way, the problem would solve itself.

Footsteps. Not heavy. Not light. Precise. Each one placed with the deliberate awareness of someone who had been trained to walk without making noise and was only making noise now because he wanted to.

The footsteps stopped about six feet from me.

I pulled one earbud out.

"The East Wing is closed after 3 PM," said the voice I'd been hearing in my sleep for the past week.

I opened one eye. Professor Navarro was standing in the doorway with a leather briefcase in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, looking at me with an expression that might have been amusement if it hadn't been so carefully controlled.

He was wearing a dark blue shirt today. No jacket. Sleeves rolled. Tattoos on display. There was a pen behind his ear and a crease between his eyebrows that suggested he'd been grading papers, which was impressive given that he'd only assigned one.

"The lock's been broken since 2018," I said.

"I'm aware. I broke it yesterday."

I opened both eyes. "You broke it?"

"I needed a place to think. Jeremy — the department secretary — mentioned this wing was mostly unused. I tested the lock. It was already compromised, but I made sure it stayed that way." He lifted his coffee cup in a kind of salute. "I wasn't expecting company."

I sat up slowly, swinging my legs off the windowsill. The stained-glass light painted stripes across my arms. I pulled my sleeves down reflexively. "How long have you been coming here?"

"Since Monday."

"That was two days ago."

"And in those two days, I've gotten more thinking done than in the last two years." He stepped into the room, his eyes moving across the space — the window, the radiator, the pile of granola bar wrappers I hadn't cleaned up because I was a goblin and this was my goblin lair. "You've been here longer."

It wasn't a question. I watched him as he set his briefcase on the floor and leaned against the opposite wall, sipping his coffee. There were five feet of space between us and it felt like both too much and not enough.

"Since freshman year," I said.

"The raccoon?"

I stared at him. "How do you know about the raccoon?"

"There are claw marks on the baseboard behind the radiator. Small, consistent with a medium-sized procyonid. Either a raccoon was living here or this building has a very unusual mouse."

"It was a raccoon. His name was Terry."

"You named the raccoon."

"He responded to it."

"Raccoons don't respond to names."

"Terry did."

Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile — he didn't seem to do those — but a loosening. A fractional relaxation of whatever iron grip he kept on his own face. It happened fast. Blink and you'd miss it.

I didn't blink.

"Here's my proposal," he said, his tone shifting to something almost businesslike. "I need a place to work during my free periods. You, apparently, need a place to hide. We share."

"What makes you think I'm hiding?"

His eyes moved to my hands — the sleeves pulled down over my knuckles, my fingers laced together, the defensive posture I adopted whenever anyone got close enough to see. Then back to my face.

"Everyone's hiding from something, Miss Glass. Some people are just more honest about it than others."

The wire hummed.

I didn't want it to. I wanted it to stay dead and quiet and safe in its deadness, because humming meant feeling, and feeling meant vulnerability, and vulnerability in my world meant getting hurt. Jordan had taught me that. My father's silence had taught me that. Three years of grief had taught me that.

But the wire hummed anyway, and I couldn't make it stop.

"Fine," I said. "But I get the windowsill."

"Agreed." He pulled the pen from behind his ear and uncapped it, already reaching for the stack of papers in his briefcase. "One condition."

"What?"

"You eat an actual lunch. Not a granola bar. Food."

I looked down at the half-eaten bar on my chest. "This is food."

"This is what food becomes after it gives up on being food. There's a sandwich place across the street. I'll buy."

"I'm not letting my professor buy me lunch."

"Then buy your own. But eat." He met my eyes. Steady. Serious. "You're thin, Miss Glass. Thinner than you should be."

The observation landed with the force of a slap, not because it was cruel but because it was precise. Nobody said that to me. Ash tiptoed around it. My therapist used phrases like "nutritional awareness" and "mindful eating habits." Even Jordan, for all his brutality, never commented on my body — he had other targets.

But Professor Navarro said it the way he said everything: directly, without decoration, like the truth was a blade and he didn't believe in sheaths.

"I'll eat," I said. "But not because you told me to."

"I don't care why you eat. I care that you do."

---

That's how it started.

Not with a bang or a confession or a sweeping romantic gesture. With a broken lock, a shared alcove, and an unspoken agreement that we would occupy the same space without acknowledging why it mattered.

He came every day during his free period — fourth hour, 1 to 2 PM. I was already there. Always already there, because I'd started skipping the cafeteria entirely to get to the alcove first, which was pathetic and obvious and I didn't care.

He worked. I pretended to read.

He graded papers with a red pen and a focus so absolute that a bomb could have gone off and he would have finished his sentence before looking up. I sat on the windowsill with Charlie's bear and a book I wasn't reading and stole glances at him when the stained-glass light hit his jaw at the right angle.

He brought coffee. Always black, always from the same shop. After the first week, he started bringing two cups. The second one was light with cream and two sugars. He never asked how I took my coffee. He just knew.

I didn't ask how he knew. Some questions are more beautiful unanswered.

On the third day, I found a paper rose on the windowsill when I arrived.

On the fourth day, two.

By the end of the second week, I had seven paper roses in a jar under my bed in Jordan's apartment, and the jar was becoming the most valuable thing I owned, and the wire in my chest was humming so loudly I was afraid someone would hear it.

We talked. Carefully at first — academic things, safe things. He asked about my writing. I told him about the novel I'd been failing to start for two years, the one about a girl who loses her twin sister and has to learn how to be a singular person after spending her entire life as a plural. He listened without that expression people got — the soft-eyed, head-tilted, "oh you poor thing" look that made me want to throw furniture.

He just listened. And then he said, "Write it."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"Because it's too close."

"That's exactly why you should write it."

"What if it's terrible?"

He set his pen down and looked at me — really looked at me — with those hazel eyes that made me feel like I was standing in a room where all the walls had been removed. "The worst thing a writer can do isn't write something terrible," he said. "It's write nothing at all. Terrible can be fixed. Nothing is permanent."

I thought about that for a long time after he said it. Sitting on the bus back to Jordan's apartment, staring at my reflection in the window, I thought about permanence and nothingness and whether the same principle applied to people.

Could terrible be fixed?

Could I?

---

## Grey

September 15th, 2021

Jeremy knocked on my office door at 6:47 PM. I knew this because I'd been staring at the clock for the past twelve minutes, trying to decide whether to call Malachi about the Diamond situation or whether to let it rot for another day.

"What?" I called without looking up.

The door opened. Jeremy Holt — sandy-haired, blue-eyed, irritatingly competent — stepped inside carrying a tablet and the expression of someone who had bad news and was trying to figure out how to make it sound like good news.

"Diamond made another move," he said. "A kid. Fourteen. Overdosed on something his people cut with fentanyl. She's in the ICU."

My pen snapped in my hand. I set both halves down on the desk and stared at the ink spreading across the paper I'd been marking. "Where?"

"St. Mary's. About twenty minutes north of campus."

"And Eris?"

"Gone. He's been moving product through the Southside distribution chain. We think Remi Harris is involved — she's been on campus, getting close to students. Could be recruiting."

Remi Harris. The blonde with the calculated smile who sat in the front row of my creative writing class and looked at me the way a person looks at something they want to acquire.

I'd been watching her. Not for the reasons she probably hoped. She had connections to Diamond's network — Malachi had flagged her six weeks ago during initial surveillance. Her presence in my class wasn't a coincidence. She was either there to watch me or to use the students around her as cover for distribution.

Either way, she was a problem.

"Keep surveillance on her," I told Jeremy. "Don't approach. I want to know everyone she talks to, everywhere she goes, every cent she spends."

"Already on it." He paused. Tapped the tablet against his palm. "There's something else."

I looked up.

"Emily Glass."

The name hit me the way it always hit me — like a fist to the solar plexus that I refused to acknowledge. "What about her?"

"She came in late this morning. Bruise on her collarbone, concealed poorly. Favouring her left side. Flinched when Cam dropped a textbook two rows behind her." He pulled up something on the tablet. "I ran a background. Her stepbrother, Jordan Glass — twenty-eight, unemployed, history of DUI arrests and domestic disturbance calls that never went anywhere because the old man paid them off. He lives with Emily in an apartment on West 34th."

I was standing before I realized I'd moved. My hands were flat on the desk, my knuckles white. The ink from the broken pen was smearing under my palm.

"How bad?" I asked. My voice was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that Malachi had taught me to recognize as the calm before something irreversible.

Jeremy met my eyes. He'd worked with me long enough to know the voice. "I don't have confirmation. Just the physical evidence. She's careful — covers everything, deflects, avoids physical contact. But the pattern is consistent with ongoing domestic abuse. Probably been happening for a while."

A while.

She'd been walking into my classroom for two weeks with bruises under her concealer and exhaustion in her bones and that careful, practiced blankness on her face that said she'd been hurt so many times she'd stopped expecting anything else.

And I'd been grading papers.

"Grey," Jeremy said carefully. "We're here for Diamond. The girl isn't—"

"Finish that sentence and you'll regret it."

He closed his mouth. Wise.

I sat back down. Picked up a new pen. Tried to focus on the stack of assignments in front of me — twenty mediocre essays about fear, most of them lies wrapped in adequate grammar. I'd read them all. I'd given them all Cs because C was what cowardice earned and these students were writing about spiders and public speaking and the dark while the girl in the back row with the dead eyes and the hidden bruises was bleeding into her notebook and calling it fiction.

Her essay was at the bottom of the stack. I'd saved it for last. Not because it was the best — though it was — but because reading her words felt like trespassing on sacred ground, and I wanted to be alone when I did it.

I pulled it out after Jeremy left.

Two thousand words about fear. No title. No pretense. No literary tricks or clever metaphors to hide behind. Just the raw, ugly, undeniable truth.

The thing I'm most afraid of is that I will always be like this.

Not sad. Not broken. Not grieving. Those words have exit strategies. Those words imply a before and an after, a starting point and an ending, and maybe that's true for other people, but the thing that keeps me awake is the possibility that this is just who I am now.

Hollow.

Like someone reached in and scooped out everything that made me a person and left the shell walking around, going to classes, eating meals, sleeping, breathing, existing in the technical sense while being absolutely absent in every way that matters.

The thing I'm most afraid of is that I'll feel like this forever. That this is permanent. That terrible can't be fixed because it isn't terrible — it's nothing. And nothing, I've learned, is the scariest thing of all.

I set the paper down.

I stared at the wall.

Then I picked up my phone and called Malachi.

"I need to stay at Calloway longer than planned."

A pause. "The Diamond situation?"

"That too."

Another pause. Longer. Malachi had a gift for reading the silences between words. "Greyson," he said carefully, "don't do anything foolish."

"I won't."

"You're a terrible liar."

"I learned from the best."

He sighed — the sigh of a father who had watched his sons make the same mistakes he'd warned them about and was tired of being right. "Be careful. She's a civilian."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I hung up. Set the phone down. Read her essay again.

The thing I'm most afraid of is that I'll feel like this forever.

I folded a paper rose.

Then another.

Then another.

By midnight, there were twelve paper roses on my desk and I still hadn't solved a single thing, but I knew — with the absolute certainty of a man who had spent his entire life navigating darkness and had just spotted a light — that I was not going to let Emily Glass feel like nothing forever.

That was either the most noble decision I'd ever made or the most dangerous.

Knowing my track record, probably both.