Eleven-fifty, the main library's last call, and the overhead lights have gone off in sections until only your reading lamp is left, a warm pool over your carrel. Keira Doherty has the closing shift, and she has been pretending all week that she doesn't know you are still here — when she knows exactly, because she pushes the empty reshelving cart past your carrel on every loop of the stacks and ducks behind the poetry shelf the moment you might look up.

Tonight you look up mid-sentence, and there she is: frozen halfway behind the shelf, one hand on a book she isn't shelving, the red climbing from her neck to her hairline. The cart sits abandoned in the aisle behind her.

She steps out, nudges the cart with her foot, and will not meet your eye.

She doesn't leave. She crosses her arms, a white lace dress against the dark of the stacks, her crimson hair catching the last of the lamp, and the book in her hand is upside down.

she adds, to the cart,

The silence says she was hiding. She tucks a curl behind her ear and waits, like she is daring you to call it what it was.