But later that morning, when I walked into my lecture hall and saw her again, third row, back straight, chin lifted, the nameEdwina Carterwritten in clear ink across the attendance sheet, everything in me stopped.
It wasn’t her face I recognized. Not immediately. It was something deeper. The way her presence crawled under my skin. The way my body remembered before my mind did. A flash. Metal, glass, blood, the sound of sirens tearing through the dark.
And then it hit me. It had been her. The girl from that night. The one I’d pulled from the wreckage.
And she had no idea.
She looked at me now with the calm poise of someone untouched by the past. Her hand steady when she wrote. Her posture exact, controlled, her voice soft but certain when she spoke. I should’ve ignored her. I should’ve kept my distance. But something in me refused. Every detail of her movements drew my attention, the way her fingers brushed over her notebook, the subtle catch of her breath when she concentrated, the quiet tension that clung to her even when she sat perfectly still.
I told myself she was just another student, that her name didn’t matter, that I didn’t care. But that was bullshit, and I knew it. She thought she was composed, unreadable, safe behind her walls. She didn’t see how much she revealed when she fell silent. And I didn’t know which truth unsettled me more, her presence or the way my mind refused to release it.
I shouldn’t have noticed her. I sure as hell shouldn’t have wanted to. Not when I knew who she was. Not when every instinct in me screamed to leave it the fuck alone.
But she had looked at me that day, no recognition, no fear, just that steady, unnerving gaze. There had been calculation in it, and something else I couldn’t name. Not curiosity. Something colder. The kind of look that stripped you bare without ever touching you.
And I hated that. I hated her for it. I hated myself more.
I’d come here for silence. For the anonymity that comes when no one gives a damn who you used to be. Greystone was supposed to be neutral ground, a place to exist without questions. I’d built my life on that, on keeping everything buried where no one could dig it up.
But the universe has a cruel fucking sense of humor. Because she was here too.
Edwina Carter. A name I hadn’t spoken aloud but couldn’t shake loose. She had woven herself into the quiet spaces beneath my skin, an irritation turned ache, something that refused to fade no matter how still I became. The more I tried to forget, the deeper she pressed. And I hated how familiar it felt.
Because in all the universities, in all the cities I could’ve vanished into, she had found her way into mine. And the cruelest part? She didn’t even remember.
She had no idea whose life she had destroyed to survive.
She stood there, a picture of restraint wrapped in elegance, every gesture measured, every movement a performance of composure that dared the world to test her. She wore detachment like a second skin, convincing herself it was born from strength rather than survival. Yet I could see the truth in the stillness she mistook for control; it was learned behavior, a reflex carved into her over years of holding her breath through pain she’d never name.
I watched her with a kind of detached precision that bordered on cruelty. Her words came carefully structured, polished until they gleamed, her tone honed to perfection, firm enough to keep people at a distance, but never so sharp that it cut too deep. She believed herself unreadable, a closed text no one could translate. But I could hear the noise in her silence, the quiet rhythm of defense beneath every calculated word. To me, she wasn’t unreadable, she was transparent in her effort to remain opaque.
There was a rational part of me that urged distance, whispering that this fixation would rot into something dangerous if I didn’t contain it. It told me to stop watching the curve of her neck when she bent over her notebook, to stop tracing the disciplined movement of her hands, to unlearn the rhythm of her focus before it became something I couldn’t control. That voice believed in reason, in restraint, in the illusion that control meant safety.
But beneath that surface calm lived something ancient and feral, something that thrived in the spaces between morality and need. It pulsed through me with slow persistence, an ache without a name, a hunger that existed long before I had words for desire. It wanted to test her, to find the place where her composure fractured and the truth beneath it bled through. I wanted to unravel her, not for revenge, not for cruelty, but because I needed to see what she became when she stopped performing for the world. I wanted to watch the tremor in her control when it finally broke, to see what lay beneath the armor she wore so flawlessly.
I shouldn’t have wanted that. I knew the cost of wanting too well. But human nature is rarely merciful, and there’s a part of me that finds beauty in ruin, the sick, inevitable need to take something unshaken and watch it crumble, to strip the polish until nothing but the raw pulse remains. I told myself I’d resist. That I’d teach, and observe, and forget her name by the end of the semester.
But I had already failed. I saw her too clearly. And worse, some stubborn, reckless part of me wanted her to see me too, to look past the authority, past the quiet detachment, past every mask I’d spent years mastering, and recognize what I truly was beneath the surface.
The corridor outside my office was steeped in that pale, indecisive light that winter brought, stretching thin ribbons ofgray across the floor. My footsteps echoed against the walls in a rhythm too calm to betray the chaos beneath my ribs. Outwardly, I was still the man everyone saw, the professor with the even tone and perfect composure, but underneath, thought ran wild and uncontained, a storm pretending to be a sky.
By the time I reached the lecture hall, the room was already alive with the dull hum of conversation, the rustle of pages, the quiet clatter of pens, the glow of screens reflecting faces too young to understand consequence. They didn’t look up when I entered. They never did until the silence followed me in and swallowed them whole.
I set my folder on the desk, the leather cool beneath my palm, the desk polished smooth from repetition. My gaze moved over the rows, a collection of ordinary faces performing attentiveness. The overachievers in the front row, the skeptics buried in the back, and somewhere between them, her.
Third row. Left side. Always the same seat.
Edwina.
She sat with her spine drawn straight, her chin tilted just enough to appear assured but not arrogant. Her movements were precise, her breathing even, her attention folded neatly into the space between my words. She hadn’t looked at me yet, she never did. It was her quiet rebellion, her unspoken insistence that I didn’t matter. But even when her eyes stayed down, I could feel her awareness, an invisible thread that stretched between us, drawn tight enough to hum.
She was pretending again. Pretending not to feel the weight of my presence. Pretending control was easy. She had no idea how visible her restraint had become.
I looked away before she caught me staring. But the damage was done. I had lingered too long again. Every fucking time, I swore it would be the last. Every fucking time, I lied.
I cleared my throat, the sound low and rough against the silence, and opened the folder. The words began to form before I’d even thought of them, slipping from habit rather than intention. My voice fell into its usual rhythm, a calm, calculated cadence trained over years of standing behind podiums and pretending that control meant clarity. Every phrase was weighted, each pause placed exactly where it needed to be, as if I could sculpt distance with tone alone.
But even as I spoke, as the dull hum of the lecture swelled around me, I felt her. She was seated where she always was, and stillness radiated from her in a way that drew attention without asking for it. Her hands barely moved, yet everything about them spoke of focus, the slow, measured shift of her wrist as her pen moved across the page, the subtle turn of her head when she concentrated, the small furrow that formed between her brows when thought consumed her. She wasn’t just writing; she was dissecting every word, aligning the logic of the room to her own private order.
