005

The registrar's office had moved over summer break and nobody had updated the school website. Clara found this out after climbing to the fourth floor, being told by a bored work-study student that it was actually on the seventh now, climbing three more floors, and arriving at a frosted glass door with a sign that said *Enrollment & Records* and a waiting area with four chairs and a number machine that printed numbers on the kind of thin thermal paper that curls at the edges.

She took a number. Sat down. Opened her folder.

She'd had the documents notarized twice because the first notary had stamped the wrong field. She'd caught it herself, gone back, gotten it fixed without making a fuss. That was three weeks ago. She'd been carrying the folder since then, checking it occasionally the way you check your pockets for your keys — not because you think they're gone, just because the cost of being wrong is too high.

Number seven was being served. She was fourteen.

She settled in and waited.

The office was quiet. Through the window she could see a slice of the campus — stone path, a row of ginkgo trees starting to turn, two students on a bench sharing earphones. Ordinary. The kind of ordinary she hadn't had access to in her last life, too busy running herself ragged trying to earn a place in a family that had already decided she didn't have one.

She wasn't going to do that again.

The door opened.

She didn't look up right away. Footsteps, unhurried. The number machine printed — she heard the small mechanical sound of it, the thin curl of paper tearing off. Then the footsteps stopped.

She looked up because the person had sat down, and when she registered where — directly across from her, out of four empty chairs — she looked back down at her documents without reacting.

He was in a suit with no tie. Somewhere around thirty. The kind of face that registers as significant before you've worked out why, which Clara had learned over two lifetimes was usually either very good or very bad depending entirely on the person wearing it.

She didn't know him.

She turned a page.

Eight was called. Then nine.

The man across from her hadn't looked at his phone. Hadn't looked at the number display. Wasn't reading anything. He was just — sitting there, in the particular way of someone used to rooms adjusting to them rather than the other way around, watching the middle distance with something running behind his eyes that looked like it had been running for a while.

Ten.

"The elevator on the east side works," he said.

Clara looked up.

He was looking at her now — not quite direct, more like he'd noticed her noticing him and decided to acknowledge it rather than pretend otherwise. "If you came up from the fourth floor. The east elevator was just serviced."

"I didn't know there was an east elevator."

"Most people don't. It's behind the language building."

She looked at him for a second. "That's a specific thing to know."

Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. The shape of one, pressed flat. "I've had reason to be on this floor before."

She nodded once and went back to her folder.

Eleven.

"Transfer?" he asked.

She glanced at the tab on her folder — *Transfer Enrollment — Supplementary Documentation* — visible from where he was sitting. She could hardly fault him for the observation. "Does it show."

"Full enrollment handles everything by email. In-person means the portal rejected something."

"Secondary ID," she said. "Apparently there's a manual override option that isn't labeled."

"First dropdown under document verification. You have to expand the section."

She looked at him properly this time. "How do you know the student portal."

"I sit on the academic advisory board."

A pause.

"So you're not a student," she said.

"No."

She looked at the number in his hand. Twenty-three. "Then why are you—"

"Nicholas Evans."

He said it the way some people introduce themselves — like the name was a piece of information she might need, offered plainly, no performance behind it. Like he'd decided something and this was the first step.

Clara held his gaze. Measured it. Measured him.

Nicholas Evans. She knew the name the way anyone who'd spent time in business circles knew it — you didn't have to have met him to have heard it. Youngest person to take chairmanship of Evans Group after his father's sudden exit. Notoriously private. Notoriously hard to read. The kind of name that preceded him into rooms before he arrived and lingered after he left.

She hadn't expected him to look like this. Quieter than the reputation. Harder to locate.

"Clara Howard," she said.

She watched the name move through him. Something caught — she could see it, that small internal pause of a person searching for a connection — and then it didn't find anything and he let it go. He'd heard it somewhere. He didn't know where yet.

That was fine. She wasn't ready for him to know where yet.

Twelve.

"What are you studying?" he asked.

"Medicine. Part time." She paused. "And business."

His eyebrow moved. Just slightly. "Both."

"Is that surprising."

"Most people pick one."

"Most people aren't trying to do two things at once," she said evenly.

He looked at her for a moment with that same careful, unhurried quality — like he was adding something up and was in no particular rush to reach the total. "What kind of business?"

"Corporate strategy. Acquisitions, mainly." She turned another page in her folder without looking down at it. "I find it interesting how quickly a company's foundations can shift when the right pressure is applied in the right places."

Silence.

She could feel him looking at her.

"That's a specific interest," he said, in the same tone she'd used on him two minutes ago.

"I've had reason to think about it," she said, and let the faintest edge of something into her voice — not quite a smile, just the shape of one — and watched him decide whether that was a joke.

Thirteen.

The printer jammed. The woman behind the counter made a sound of quiet, personal suffering and got up to deal with it. The waiting area went still.

Clara closed her folder. Recrossed her ankles. She was aware — in the way she was aware of most things, with that particular low-level attentiveness that had become habit across two lifetimes — that Nicholas Evans had not checked his phone once since sitting down, had barely glanced at the number display, was sitting in a registrar's waiting room with a number he almost certainly didn't need for any real purpose and had still not explained why.

She wasn't going to ask.

If he wanted to explain he would. People who were used to being in control of rooms were also usually in control of what they offered and when. Asking would just hand him something.

"Do you live on campus?" he asked.

"Off campus. Westside." She paused. "You?"

"I have an office in the Evans building. East side of campus." A beat. "The university named it after my grandfather."

"I know," she said.

His eyes sharpened slightly. "You know the building."

"I did my research before enrolling." She held his gaze. "It would have been strange not to know whose name was on the largest building on campus."

Something in his expression shifted — she caught it before he smoothed it back. Not irritation. More like recalibration. Like he'd walked into a conversation expecting it to go one way and it kept not going that way, and he wasn't quite sure yet whether that was a problem or not.

Fourteen.

She stood. Gathered her folder, her bag, her coffee cup that had gone cold at the bottom.

He stood too. She looked at him once — and he was already looking back, that careful, contained expression giving nothing away, just watching the way he'd been watching since she walked in, like she was something he didn't have the full shape of yet and it was going to keep bothering him until he did.

"Good luck with the documents," he said.

"I won't need luck," she said. "I have everything in order."

She walked to the counter.

She handled it in eleven minutes. Right documents, right order, right questions asked before they could become problems. The woman behind the counter visibly relaxed halfway through, the way people do when they realize the person in front of them isn't going to make the afternoon harder.

When Clara turned to leave, the chair across from where she'd been sitting was empty. Number twenty-three gone with it.

She walked to the stairwell — she knew where the east elevator was now, she just didn't feel like using it — and pushed through the door.

One floor down, standing on the landing with his phone finally in his hand, was Nicholas Evans. He glanced back when the door opened. For just a second before everything settled back into composure, she caught something on his face. Not surprise. Not quite.

More like the quiet, unsettled feeling of a name you've heard before that still won't place itself.

He moved to let her pass.

She went down without a word.

But on the fifth floor landing, alone in the concrete echo of the stairwell, she let herself think it — just once, quickly — so that's what he's like.

Then she kept walking.

There was too much still ahead of her. Too much to dismantle, too much to rebuild.

Nicholas Evans could wait.

For now.