"I'm fine," he says.
I hold his gaze for exactly long enough. Then I skate away.
The locker room after practice is loud. Music, voices, the hiss of showers, and the smell of sweat and rubber and tape.
Silas drops onto the bench beside me, already half out of his gear. "Beckett looks rough."
"He does."
"You going to say something?"
"I already did."
Silas pulls his jersey over his head. "And?"
"And he said he's fine." I unlace my skates.
Silas is quiet for a moment. Then, low enough that it doesn't carry, "How bad is it?"
I think about Adela turning her phone face down on the library table. Beckett's name on the screen.
"Bad enough," I say.
Silas nods slowly. He doesn't ask anything else. That's what I've always appreciated about him — he understands when a sentence is finished.
I finish changing, grab my bag, and leave without another word.
The library is quiet at four in the afternoon.
There's a text I've been meaning to pull for weeks, something on Foucault that would strengthen the third chapter of my thesis. I have forty minutes before I need to be at my mother's office.
I take the elevator to the third floor.
She's there.
Head down, hair falling forward, laptop open, one hand wrapped around a coffee cup. She doesn’t look up. She's too far inside whatever she's writing, her shoulders slightly hunched, her pen moving across a notepad beside the keyboard.
She writes things down twice. I've noticed that. It’s like she doesn't trust the screen to hold things properly.
I cross the floor without hurrying and come up behind her.
Her essay is open on the screen. The extra credit response for Professor Aldridge — I can tell by the header, the citation format, and the way she's structured the argument in three clean movements. She's writing about compliance. About the psychological mechanisms that allow institutions to sustain authority beyond their legitimate mandate.
She's used something I said in the talk.
Not quoted. Paraphrased, folded into her own argument so smoothly that someone who hadn't been in that room wouldn't catch it. But I catch it.
I read to the end of the paragraph and smirk.
She's smarter than she looks.
I lean in slightly, reading the next section, and she must feel the shift in the air or the warmth of proximity or something, because her hands go still on the keyboard.
Then she slams the laptop shut.
She turns in her chair and finds me standing approximately eighteen inches behind her, and the color that moves up her throat is immediate and involuntary. I’ve made her nervous, how…delicate.
"How long have you been standing there?" she asks.
