Chapter 3: Receipt

"You've read that same scrap of paper four times in the last two minutes. I'm timing you."

I fold the note into my apron pocket like it might catch fire. "It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. Your hands are shaking and you've made two wrong orders since the golden retriever pack left." Priya leans against the espresso machine, arms crossed, dark eyes narrowed in the particular way that means she has already decided she isn't leaving this alone. "Show me."

"Priya."

"Rebecca Marie Hale."

"That's not even my middle name."

"It worked, didn't it? Show me the note."

I should say no. I should tuck it deeper into my pocket and finish my shift and go home and pretend today never happened, that a boy I've loved from a careful, cowardly distance for six years didn't just prove he remembers a rainy staircase I thought only existed in my own head. But Priya has been peeling my secrets out of me since freshman orientation, when she caught me crying in a bathroom stall over a home I missed and didn't try to fix it, just sat on the floor outside the door until I was ready to talk. She has earned the right to this one.

I hand it over.

She reads it twice, lips moving slightly, and when she looks up her expression has gone from curious to alarmed in a way that makes my stomach drop. "This is Christian Ashworth's handwriting."

"You know his handwriting?"

"Everybody who's ever gotten a rejected club-funding request from student council knows his handwriting, he signs everything. That's not the point." She waves the note like evidence at a trial. "The point is Christian Ashworth just told you he remembered your name for six years. What does that mean? What staircase? What rain?"

So I tell her. The gala, the jacket, the twenty minutes on wet stone steps when I was fifteen and believed for the length of one conversation that a boy that golden could see a girl like me. I tell her about this morning, the seating chart, the stairwell, him asking if we knew each other and me lying straight to his face because some old, scarred part of me still remembers what happens to girls who hand rich boys their softest truths.

Priya listens without interrupting, which for Priya is its own kind of alarm bell.

"And now he wants you at the library. Tonight. Alone." She says each word like she's setting down a chess piece. "Rebecca, I love that you have main character energy for once in your life, but this is also exactly how girls end up as a cautionary tale at RA training."

"It's a public library on a public campus."

"On the third floor, which everyone knows is a ghost town after eight because the elevator's broken and nobody wants to take the stairs." She softens, reaching out to squeeze my wrist. "I'm not trying to scare you. I just don't want you walking into whatever this is without your eyes open. Boys like that don't send secret notes because they want to hold hands in the quad."

"I know what he is." I do. I've spent years cataloguing exactly what Christian Ashworth is: wealthy, watched, careful with his image in a way that makes careless things like me a liability. "I just want to know why he lied about the top score. Why he lied about not knowing me. People don't lie twice in one hour for no reason."

"No," she agrees slowly. "They don't."

The door chimes and we both startle like we've been caught at something. It's just a delivery, boxes of syrup, and Priya exhales and goes to sign for it, throwing one last look over her shoulder.

"Text me the second you leave that library. And the second before, and probably twice in between."

"You're not my mother."

"No, but if something happens to you I'm the one who has to call her, and I have met your mother, Rebecca, and I am not doing that phone call."

That gets a laugh out of me, small and real, the first one all day that doesn't have Christian's name tangled up in it somewhere.

The shift crawls after that. I restock cups I don't need to restock, wipe counters that are already clean, check the clock so many times Priya starts announcing the minutes out loud just to torture me. By the time seven rolls around and my replacement shows up, my nerves have worn themselves into something thin and electric, stretched tight enough to hum.

I don't go straight to the library. I walk the long way, past the quad where the last of the daylight is bleeding orange into the brick, past the dining hall where I can hear, faintly, Dom's laugh carrying through an open window, and I let myself imagine, just for one indulgent block, what it would mean if the note was real. If six years ago mattered to him the way it has quietly, uselessly mattered to me.

Then I remember the stairwell. We've never met. His own lie, offered up so easily it barely took him a breath, and I remember that whatever this is, whatever door he's opening tonight, he has already shown me exactly how fast he can slam one shut when someone he cares about more is standing close enough to hear it.

The library rises up ahead of me, old stone and gold windows, most of its floors already dark for the night. I climb the front steps, phone gripped tight in my hand, and I am reaching for the door when it swings open from the inside and a girl steps out directly into my path, blocking the entrance, arms crossed, smiling like she has been waiting for me specifically.

I have never spoken to her before. I don't need to. Everyone on this campus knows Sloane Whitmore's face, her voice, the particular way she can make a compliment feel like a verdict.

"Rebecca, right?" she says, tilting her head. "Funny. I didn't know you and Christian were friends."