I’ve always been able to disappear into the task. Into the work. When everything else is unraveling, the act of writing things down is the only thing that feels honest.
I’m twenty minutes into the lecture when I feel it. Not a sound. Not a movement. A directed warmth of being watched.Not the casual, sweeping glance of a room full of half-awake students. Something fixed. Something that has found its target and settled.
My pen slows on the page.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
I look.
The back row is where the shadows pool deepest in this room, where the tiered seating rises high enough that the ceiling lights don’t quite reach.
Most of the students back there are slumped in their chairs, hoods up, some with coffee cups balanced on the corner of their desks.
But not the one in the far corner.
He’s too still for the room. Too awake. Too present in the way that only certain kinds of people are. He’s big, the kind of broad-shouldered, heavy-frame man that makes the standard university chair look structurally inadequate.
Dark hoodie.
No coffee.
No notebook.
I can’t see his face from where I sit.
But I can feel his eyes on me.
After a few seconds, he moves toward the light out from the shadow. Our eyes meet for less than a second before I snap mine back to the front, my heart hammering so hard I’m certain the girl sitting two seats over can hear it.
My face is hot.
My hand is shaking on the pen.
It’s him.
The guy from the courtyard.
Yesterday, that seat was empty.
The day before and every day since I arrived.
But today it isn’t.
I stare at Professor Harlan’s slides and tell myself I didn’t notice because I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t remember because I was too focused on the note. I tell myself I’m hypervigilant and pattern-seeking because of my history, because Dr. Osei, back in New York, told me my nervous system doesn’t know the difference between past danger and present safety, and that I’m probably catastrophizing again.
But my body doesn’t believe any of it.
After class, I move fast.
I don’t linger at the door, check my phone, or do any of the things normal people do when a lecture ends.
I pull my bag onto my shoulder, and I go, cutting through the stream of students heading for the exits, aiming for the side door that lets out onto the smaller courtyard.
The air outside is cold and clean.
I stop against the stone wall and breathe it in.
“You walk like someone’s chasing you.”
