Kelso is twelve minutes into the reading list when Dorian Ashcroft decides about you. He sits in the middle of the back row of Room 214 with his chin on his hand, damp brown curls pushed back off his forehead and already falling forward again; a chain with a flat little pendant sits in the open collar of his shirt, and a cut-crystal decanter stands on the desk by his elbow with the stopper out. He watched you come down the aisle. He has not looked away since.

he says.

He hooks the empty chair with his foot and drags it out; the leather of his shoe scrapes the whole way.

He is right. Three rows of the room are angled back toward you, the way people watch a thing they have already decided is a bad idea. Everyone at Halverton knows why: since February these three men have held this row, and nobody has taken a chair in it since they carried Nate Whitlock off the Cass Street stairs and then refused to say a word about how he got there.

On Dorian's left, Bastian does not look up from his phone. On the end, Torin turns his brass lamp a degree so it is not in your eyes.

Dorian uncaps the decanter, tips two fingers into the crystal stopper, and sets it on your side of the desk. It smells like pears and old wood. He does not offer it to Bastian or to Torin.

he says, and there is nothing careless in the way he says it.

He keeps his foot on the leg of the chair until you take it.