By the time I reached the carved oak doors of Hawthorne Hall, my palms were already slick.
Blackthorn’s main building looked exactly like the glossy brochure I used to hide under my pillow in high school—neo-Gothic arches, leaded glass, stone that had seen more secrets than any of us ever would. It was also the place where my mother’s name had been quietly scrubbed from a brass plaque outside the lab wing.
Today, I was walking back into the crime scene.
I wiped my hand on my jeans and adjusted the strap of my backpack, fingers brushing the worn leather folder tucked inside. Mei Chen’s file. The official report of how she ruined everything.
I forced my shoulders back. I hadn’t clawed my way into Blackthorn’s doctoral program just to flinch at a door.
Inside, the hall hummed with first-day noise. Footsteps, overlapping voices, the metallic click of someone’s coffee mug against a rail. It smelled like old paper and new ambition. Students clustered in nervous knots, laughter pitched a bit too high. A pair of undergrads leaned against a column, whispering and side-eyeing me.
I caught the word "Chen" and the quick flick of their gazes away when I looked over.
So. The campus gossip pipeline was efficient. Good. Let them talk. Better that than the sticky silence that had followed us around our old neighborhood after the scandal broke.
I checked my phone for the room number again even though I’d memorized it: 204. Advanced Methodologies in Cognitive Modeling. Instructor: Professor Elias Rowan.
The man whose grant had been sacrificed to plug the hole my mother supposedly tore in the department’s reputation.
Mentor assignment: Professor Elias Rowan, the email had said, as if it were just another line item. As if those three words hadn’t landed like a punch to the sternum.
I found Room 204 at the end of a stone corridor, the door already propped open. Rows of tiered seating fanned out toward a blackboard and a sleek dual-screen projection setup. Half the seats were full, laptops and tablets glowing like a scatter of constellations.
And there he was, at the front.
Elias Rowan looked nothing like the stiff faculty page photo I’d spent too much time dissecting this summer. In person, he was sharper. The dark suit jacket fit a little too well, like it had been tailored around the angles of his shoulders. His shirt sleeves were rolled neatly to his forearms, exposing precise wrists and an expensive-looking watch. Brown hair pushed back in an almost careless way that I suspected was calculated.
He was writing something on the board in clean, ruthless lines of chalk, every stroke efficient. The room buzzed with the low murmur of students pretending not to stare at him.
I took the first empty seat in the second row, dead center. If I was going to sit in his class for a semester, there was no point in hiding in the back.
My chest tightened as I set my notebook down. I could feel eyes on me, the slight shift in conversation around my name traveling like pressure through the air.
Rowan capped the marker, turned toward us, and the conversation snapped off like someone had cut power.
He surveyed the room once, unreadable. When his gaze passed over me, it didn’t stop. No flare of recognition, no visible reaction.
