He was already there when she arrived.

Sloane spotted him the moment she walked through the seminar room door, not because she was looking for him specifically but because Marco Reyes was the kind of person a room reorganized itself around without asking permission. He had taken the seat directly across from where she had sat last week, which she recognized as either coincidence or strategy, and she had learned enough in twenty years to know that men who looked like that rarely operated on coincidence.

He glanced up when she entered.

He smiled like he had been expecting her.

She picked a different seat.

Riley, sliding in beside her thirty seconds later, leaned over and whispered, "He watched you walk across the entire room."

"I know," Sloane said.

"And you sat as far away as possible."

I know.

Just checking that you're aware of your own behavior and not just running on instinct.

"Riley."

Present.

Stop talking.

Riley opened her notebook with the expression of someone who was absolutely going to keep talking, just not out loud, and began writing observations in the margin that Sloane could read from the corner of her eye and chose not to.

Dr. Vance opened the session with a discussion on source development, the ethics of proximity, how close a journalist could get to a subject before the relationship compromised the reporting. Sloane found this choice of topic so specifically uncomfortable that she briefly considered whether the universe had a personality and whether that personality was mean.

Twenty minutes in, Dr. Vance broke them into pairs for a practice interview exercise.

Of course she did.

"Mr. Reyes, Miss Calloway. You're paired."

Of course they were.

Marco picked up his chair and moved it across the circle toward her with the easy physical confidence of someone who had never once been uncertain about how he would be received. He set it down, sat, and extended a hand.

"Marco Reyes," he said, like it was the opening line of something he had been rehearsing.

"I know who you are," Sloane said, shaking it briefly.

"Good start." He settled back. You're Jaxon Calloway's sister.

"I know who I am too."

He smiled at that, wider this time, genuine. "Fair enough. You want to go first or should I?"

"I'll go," she said. She clicked her pen. "What made you transfer mid-program?"

The smile adjusted slightly, something recalibrating behind his eyes. He had expected small talk first. She noted that.

"Better program," he said. Better coaching staff. Better shot at being seen by the right people at the right time.

And it had nothing to do with leaving something behind?

He studied her for a moment. "You're good at this."

"I asked a question."

"And I'm considering it." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on knees. Everyone transfers toward something and away from something else at the same time. I don't think those are mutually exclusive.

She wrote that down.

"Your turn," she said.

He did not look at his notebook. He just looked at her, easy and unhurried, like he had all the time that existed.

"How long have you been doing the thing where you make yourself harder to read than you actually are?" he asked.

She looked up from her notes.

"That's not a journalism question," she said.

"Dr. Vance said to practice source development. I'm developing."

Try again.

He tilted his head. "What do you want out of this semester?"

"The credit."

Besides that.

"That's all."

"Okay," he said. He said it the way people said okay when they did not believe you but had decided to let it go for now, filing it away for later. She recognized that move too.

The exercise ended. The room reshuffled. Dr. Vance assigned a short profile piece due in two weeks, subject of their choice, and dismissed them with ten minutes to spare.

Sloane was packing her bag when Marco stopped beside her, not hovering, just present.

"Good interview technique," he said. Seriously. You went for the real question before I had my guard up.

She glanced at him. "That's the point."

"I know. I'm paying you a compliment."

I noticed.

You're not going to say thank you, are you?

"Thank you," she said, and slung her bag over her shoulder.

He laughed, short and surprised, and she was almost to the door when he said, "There's a team breakfast thing Saturday morning. Unofficial, just the new and returning players mixing before the season ramps up. Caden runs it every year." A beat. Jaxon's guys were invited as a goodwill thing. You should come.

She stopped with her hand on the doorframe.

Why would I come to a team breakfast?

"Because you're new here and you don't know very many people yet and it's just breakfast." He said it simply, without angle, which was almost more disarming than if he had pushed. No obligation. I just thought you might want something that felt normal.

She looked at him for a moment.

"I'll think about it," she said.

She walked out into the corridor and nearly collided with Caden Mercer for the second time in a week, except this time there was no backyard and no shadows and no convenient chaos to dissolve into. He was standing in the hallway outside the seminar room with Theo, who was exactly as tall as advertised, and he caught her by the arm on reflex the same way he had the first night.

He let go immediately.

They stood a foot apart in the bright corridor light.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," she said.

Behind her she heard Marco step out of the room. She felt the moment Caden registered with him, not dramatically, just a small shift in his posture, the kind that happened below the level of conscious decision.

"Marco," Caden said evenly.

"Cap," Marco said, with a smile that knew exactly what it was doing.

The hallway held all three of them for one long uncomfortable second.

Then Sloane said, "I have class," which was not true, and walked away from all of it.

She made it twenty feet before Theo's voice carried down the corridor behind her, loud and entirely unaware of the damage it was doing.

"Dude, is that Jaxon Calloway's sister? The one from the party?"

A pause.

"The one you kissed?"

Sloane stopped walking.

The corridor was not empty.

Three people she did not know had just heard that.

She did not turn around.

She stood completely still for three full seconds.

The corridor noise continued around her, footsteps and conversations and the distant sound of a door swinging shut somewhere down the hall, all of it carrying on with complete indifference to the fact that Sloane Calloway's carefully constructed invisibility had just developed a very serious crack.

She turned around slowly.

Theo had the expression of a man who had just watched himself step on a landmine and was still processing the physics of what came next. He was looking at Caden with the specific horror of someone who understood exactly what he had done and needed the universe to rewind approximately eight seconds.

The universe declined.

Caden was not looking at Theo. He was looking at Sloane, steady and still, with an expression she was starting to recognize as his version of bracing for impact.

Marco was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, looking between all three of them with the calm attention of someone watching a film he had not been given context for but was already finding interesting.

The three students she did not know were doing the thing people did when they had accidentally absorbed information that felt significant. Two of them had already looked away with the performative disinterest of people who intended to repeat what they heard the moment they got somewhere private. The third was still looking directly at her.

Sloane made a decision.

She walked back.

Not toward Caden. Toward the three students.

"Hey," she said. Her voice came out level. She was proud of that. "I don't think we've met. I'm Sloane. I transferred about two weeks ago."

The one still looking at her blinked. "I'm Priya."

"Priya. Are you in Dr. Vance's class?"

"No, I'm just cutting through."

"Okay." Sloane smiled, the kind of smile that was warm enough to be disarming. "Then you probably caught a bit of a conversation that didn't have any context. Which makes it pretty meaningless, right?"

Priya looked at her for a moment. Then something in her expression settled. "Sure. Yeah. Totally."

"Great." Sloane held the smile for one more second, then let it go. "Have a good afternoon."

Priya and her two companions moved on down the corridor. Sloane watched them go with the focused attention of someone calculating variables.

Then she turned back.

"Outside," she said to no one in particular, and walked toward the building exit without checking if anyone followed.

They did. All three of them, which she had not entirely planned for but could work with.

The afternoon was cold and bright, the quad half empty at this hour. She stopped on the path outside the building entrance and turned to face them. Theo opened his mouth.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "Genuinely. That was completely my fault and I didn't think and I'm sorry."

"It's done," she said. "How loud were you generally in there?"

Theo winced. "Moderately."

"So probably more than three people."

"Possibly."

She absorbed that. "Okay."

"Okay?" Caden said.

"I can't un-ring the bell. I can manage the noise around it." She looked at him directly. "Which means you and I need to be very boring and very publicly uninteresting for the foreseeable future."

Something moved across his face. "Boring."

"Completely unremarkable. Nothing to see. Two people who have occasionally been in the same room and have no particular feelings about that."

"Right," Marco said from slightly behind Caden, with a tone that suggested he found this plan both reasonable and entertaining in equal measure.

She had almost forgotten he was there.

"This doesn't change anything," she said, mostly to Caden, keeping her voice flat and informational. "Last night you said you weren't going anywhere. I need you to reconsider that."

Caden looked at her steadily. "And if I don't."

"Then you make both our lives significantly more complicated."

"They're already complicated."

"They can get worse." She shifted her bag on her shoulder. "Jaxon cannot hear that. Not from campus gossip, not from anyone who caught half a sentence in a corridor. You understand that."

"I understand that," Caden said. His voice had gone quieter. "I also understand that you're standing here running damage control instead of actually dealing with the fact that this happened."

"I am dealing with it."

"You're managing it. Those aren't the same thing."

She stared at him.

He stared back.

Theo was looking at the middle distance with the energy of a person trying very hard to be a tree.

"I have to go," Sloane said.

She left before anyone could respond, cutting across the quad toward her residence hall with her jaw set and her eyes forward, running the variables in her head. Three confirmed students in that corridor, possibly more within earshot, a story that was currently small enough to contain if nothing else fed it. She needed it to stay small. She needed Caden Mercer to be boring and distant and completely uninteresting to anyone watching, and she needed that to start immediately.

She was so deep in the calculation that she almost missed the figure sitting on the steps outside her residence hall.

Almost.

Paige Donovan stood up when she saw her coming, and Sloane had never met her before but she knew exactly who she was because Jaxon had mentioned her once with a particular kind of satisfaction that older brothers reserved for ex-girlfriends who made their rivals miserable.

Caden's ex.

Here. Now. Outside her building.

"You're Sloane Calloway," Paige said. She was polished and pretty and had the careful composure of someone who had rehearsed this.

"I am," Sloane said slowly.

Paige smiled. It did not reach anything above her mouth.

"I just wanted to introduce myself. I heard you were new here." She tilted her head. "I also heard something interesting in the Calloway building this morning. Something about a housing request your brother made." She paused. "And why did he cancelled it so fast?"

Sloane went very still.

"I think we should talk," Paige said. "Don't you?"

Sloane looked at Paige Donovan standing on her steps with that careful rehearsed smile, and felt the entire careful architecture of her plan developing its second crack of the day.

Paige already knew something. The question was not what she knew.

The question was who she had already told.