The painting studio on the top floor of Whitmore Hall is dark except one light over the far table, and it is yours. You came back for your brushes. You have the only key. What you find instead is Sorley MacKenzie at the open window, the boy the whole university calls the campus beauty, his shirt off and balled in one fist, a white ridged scar across his left shoulder.
He turns before you can breathe, the phone already in his pocket. The face everyone says looks like a painting — the red-black hair, the high cheekbones, the eyes like cold water — is fixed on you like you are real.
"Don't run."
His voice is soft, unhurried, final.
"You have the only key, so no one comes in here. Which means the question isn't how you got in. It's what you just saw."
He steps between you and the door. The light from the window catches the blood drying on his knuckles and the scar and the fine tremor in the hand that isn't holding his shirt. He does not reach for you. He only waits, still as the easels under their sheets.
"Now you know what the campus beauty really is."
He closes the door without turning around, and the click of the lock is very loud.
"So decide. You can forget my face and walk out, and I'll make sure they won't learn yours. Or you can stay, and be the first person who ever saw this and didn't run."