Chapter 1: A Familiar Face

Elara noticed him because he did not look at her the way everyone else did.

He didn’t scan the room when he entered. Didn’t pause to assess faces, bodies, possibilities. He walked straight to the lectern like the room already belonged to him, like the attention had been granted long before he asked for it.

Professor Adrian Moore.

That was the name typed neatly at the top of the syllabus now resting on her desk, the paper still warm from the printer. Elara traced the letters absently with her thumb as she watched him arrange his notes, unhurried, precise.

He looked young. Not young in the way students liked to joke about, no boyish softness, no clumsy eagerness; but young in a way that made his authority feel deliberate rather than inherited. Like something he’d chosen and learned to wear well. Twenty-six, she guessed. Maybe twenty-seven. The thought arrived fully formed, uninvited.

Then she saw his face.

Her chest tightened instantly. Her mind skipped.

No. That couldn’t be possible.

He looked so much like her brother; the same strong jawline, the curve of his lips, the set of his eyes, but it wasn’t exact. He was taller, his eyes lighter, and his hair fell longer, sweeping past his collar. The resemblance was uncanny, disorienting, like seeing a reflection she didn’t recognize.

Elara’s brain scrambled. How is this possible? she thought. It can’t be…he’s just…similar?

Her pulse quickened despite herself. Familiarity and confusion tangled in her chest. She’d felt something like this before, when she glimpsed a stranger with the same smile as her brother, or the same posture but never so strongly, never so immediate.

She told herself it was nothing.

Still, she shifted in her seat, eyes flicking back to him. Every movement, every gesture drew her attention, a strange mix of intrigue, unease, and recognition that she couldn’t explain.

He began speaking. His voice was calm, measured, textured with a softness that made listening feel intimate even from a distance. He didn’t perform his intelligence. He trusted it. Let it sit in the room without demanding applause.

Elara liked that more than she wanted to admit.

She took notes carefully, though she couldn’t have said later what exactly she was writing. Her attention kept drifting, not to his mouth, not to his hands, but to his face. The lines of it. The structure. The way his expressions moved like he was used to being observed.

And then, without warning, a thought slipped into her mind so cleanly it startled her.

He looks like my brother.

The realization didn’t land like a shock. It settled…heavy, uneasy. She blinked and pushed it away immediately.

Ridiculous.

People looked alike all the time. Same haircuts, same angles, same generic symmetry. She’d seen Elias in strangers before, in passing reflections, in crowds, in the occasional man who shared his smile and stole her breath for half a second before dissolving back into nothing.

This was just another one of those moments.

Except.

Except Elias’s face lived in her memory in a way no one else’s did. It was the first thing she looked for when she got home, the anchor of familiarity in a world that kept changing too fast. And now here it was, fragmented and rearranged on a stranger who was not him.

Same eyes.

Not the color. no, those were different, but the shape. The way they rested in his face. The way they sharpened when he made a point, softened when he paused to let a sentence breathe.

Her pen stilled.

She told herself she was projecting.

Still, when he smiled. brief, restrained, like a concession, her stomach dipped in a way it hadn’t since she was sixteen and Elias had leaned against the kitchen counter, laughing at something she’d said, sunlight cutting his face in half.

She swallowed.

The lecture ended without incident. Chairs scraped, conversations resumed, the spell broke. Adrian gathered his things efficiently, answering a few questions with polite distance before moving on.

Elara waited longer than she needed to. She told herself she was checking her notes, and when she finally stood, he looked up.

This time, he didn’t look away.

Their eyes met, and something flickered across his face…curiosity, maybe. Or recognition of a different kind. The moment stretched just long enough to feel deliberate.

“Miss—?” he prompted gently, glancing at the roster in his hand.

“Elara,” she said. Her voice sounded steadier than she felt. “Elara Vale.”

“Ah.” He smiled again, this one slower. “Yes. I thought so.”

The words meant nothing. And yet, she didn’t ask what he meant. She didn’t trust herself to hear the answer.

As she left the lecture hall, the afternoon light felt too bright, too exposed. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, a text from Elias.

"You alive?"

She smiled despite herself, thumbs moving automatically.

"Barely. New professor thinks he owns the place."

A pause. Then her brotherr eplied:

"They all do. You’ll be fine."

She slipped the phone away, her smile fading.

Behind her, Adrian watched her go, his expression unreadable.

He would remember her face later.

And she would spend the rest of the day trying not to think about how easily his had slipped into her mind.

But by evening, that same face had burrowed into her thoughts again. Too much. Too vivid. She tried to shake it off as she walked past the campus library, but her steps slowed instinctively, and before she knew it, she found herself standing in front of a door she hadn’t intended to approach.

Elara didn’t mean to go to his office hours. She told herself she was only clarifying the syllabus. That it was practical. That it was efficient. She even believed it until she found herself standing outside his door, fingers hovering uselessly over the wood.

A.MOORE

Office 3B

She knocked before she could talk herself out of it.

“Come in.”