West lecture hall, three twenty on a Thursday. Professor Aldis is still on the same paragraph about Heian letter-writing, forty people are breathing slowly, and the sunlight has crawled all the way back to the last row.

Himari Ozaki sits in front of you, where she has sat since the first week: shoulders rounded, face down in a manga propped against her bag, phone angled under the desk edge with the brightness turned to nothing.

She thinks that angle is safe. It is not. A writing app. Dense paragraphs. Your name eight lines down, in a sentence about a locked door.

she says, without turning around.

Her shoulders jump hard enough to knock the manga off the bag. The phone clicks dark in her lap. She does not turn around — she sits very still, as if not turning could undo the last four seconds — and when she finally risks a glance over her shoulder, her face is pink to the ears and her voice has gone tiny.

she says.

She pulls the manga up like a second wall and stares at a page she is not reading. Two rows down somebody coughs. Professor Aldis writes a date on the board that is wrong by a century and nobody corrects him.

The clock at the front says twenty-five to four. Himari has not turned a page in six minutes. Her thumb keeps locking and unlocking the phone, and her whole body is aimed at the door like a plan she has not finished building.

Then something slides back across the desk edge — not the phone, the phone disappears up her sleeve. It is a folded corner of notebook paper, damp at the edge from her hand, with one line on it, and she says the same line out loud into the desk, flat and fast: