Three Weeks

CHAPTER 6

POV: Mia

Three weeks sounded like enough time.

Mia told herself that Thursday morning while brushing her teeth. Told herself again on the walk to campus, coffee in hand, earphones in, music she wasn’t actually listening to. Three weeks was twenty one days. Five hundred and four hours. Enough time to build a habit, break one, cross an ocean, fall out of love.

Enough time to get this under control.

She almost believed it.

The problem with Ryder Holt was that he didn’t do anything she could point to.

He didn’t flirt, not obviously, not in any way she could screenshot and show Priya and say look, see, this is the thing I’m dealing with. He didn’t touch her. Didn’t say things that crossed lines. He showed up to their sessions on time, worked harder than anyone she’d ever sat across from, said things that were occasionally devastating but always, always, deniable.

“You’re good at this”. “You’re just not trusting it”.

“People who grew up holding their space argue differently”.

“You don’t agree with me until I’ve earned it”.

Deniable. All of it. She could present any single moment to a jury and they’d find him innocent.

The problem was the accumulation.

The problem was that she’d started noticing the specific weight of a room before he entered it and after he left. The problem was that Wednesday sessions had become the fixed point her week organized itself around without her permission. The problem was that she knew how he took his coffee and that he laughed with his whole chest when he didn’t mean to and that his father had died four years ago and left him with a mission dressed up as a law degree.

She knew too much about someone she should know nothing about.

Thursday’s lecture ended early.

She was packing her bag when Priya appeared at her elbow, already wearing the expression of someone arriving with information.

“He’s outside,” Priya said.

Mia didn’t look up. “Who.”

“Mia.”

“I’m asking a genuine question, Priya. Who is outside?”

“The man you’ve been “not thinking” about for two weeks.” Priya grabbed her own bag. “He’s by the side entrance. Talking to some postgrad students. Looking—” she paused, searching for the word, “—criminally unbothered.”

“Good for him.”

“He asked about you.”

Mia’s hands stilled on her zip.

“He asked Professor Ade when your dissertation consultation was scheduled,” Priya continued, voice carefully neutral. “Casually. Like he was just making conversation. Professor Ade mentioned it to Sade who told me.”

“That could mean anything.”

“It could,” Priya agreed pleasantly. “It means he’s paying attention to your schedule, Mia. That’s what it means.”

She finished zipping her bag. Stood up. “I’m going to the library.”

“The fourth floor?”

“The second floor.” A pointed look. “Because that’s where the books I need are.”

Priya raised both hands in surrender and said nothing.

She made it exactly as far as the side entrance.

He was there, leaning against the wall with one ankle crossed over the other, phone in hand, the postgrad students gone. Alone. Like he’d been waiting without making a production of it.

He looked up when she pushed through the door.

“Caldwell.”

She kept walking. “Holt.”

He fell into step beside her.

Just like that. No asking. No do you mind or heading anywhere specific. He simply matched her pace and walked alongside her like this was already a thing they did.

“I’m going to the library,” she said.

“I know. Second floor.” A beat. “Ade mentioned your consultation is Friday. You’ll want the Okonkwo texts. They’re not in the system, physical copies only, east wall, third shelf from the bottom.”

She stopped walking.

He stopped with her.

“You know where my books are,” she said slowly.

“I wrote my second year paper on adjacent theory.” Entirely calm. “I know the shelf.”

“Ryder.”

“Mia.”

She looked at him. He looked back. The afternoon moved around them, students passing, someone cycling too fast across the courtyard, a group laughing near the fountain, and none of it touched this particular pocket of air.

“You asked about my consultation,” she said.

Something moved across his face. Not guilt. Ryder Holt, she was learning, didn’t do guilt about things he’d decided. More like acknowledgment. “Yes I did, and”?

“I was curious where your research was going,” he said.

“You could have asked me.”

“I’m asking you now.” His head tilted slightly. “Where is it going?”

She stared at him for a long moment.

“You’re impossible,” she said.

“You’re not the first person to say that.”

“I believe it completely.”

They stood there another second, this ridiculous, charged, entirely deniable second and then she started walking again. He didn’t follow this time. She could feel him not following, which was somehow worse than if he had.

At the corner she stopped.

Turned back without deciding to.

He was still watching her from where she’d left him. Hands in his jacket pockets now, the wind moving through his hair, looking at her with that particular patience that had no performance in it.

“East wall,” she said. “Third shelf from the bottom.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Third from the bottom.”

She turned and walked away.

Her heart was doing something complicated and loud and she told it firmly to stop.

It didn’t stop.

Friday came.

Consultation in the morning, two lectures in the afternoon, and by evening she was at her desk with her notes spread out and Ethan’s voice warm through her earphones as he talked about the apartment he’d booked near her campus for his three weeks.

“I want to take you to that restaurant you mentioned,” he was saying. “The one with the courtyard. And I thought we could do a weekend trip, somewhere close, just two days, just us.”

“That sounds perfect babe,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Ethan. Really.”

He went quiet in that warm way. “I’ve missed you so much. You have no idea.”

“I think I have some idea.”

He laughed. “Fair point.”

She smiled at her notes. This was real. This was warm and real and chosen and good. This was what twenty one days looked like, full of courtyard restaurants and weekend trips and a person who loved her without complication.

She held onto that.

She was still holding onto it when her phone lit up on the desk.

Ryder: How was the consultation?

She stared at the message.

Ethan was still talking in her earphones. something about packing, about what to bring, about how he couldn’t wait to actually see her face.

She looked at Ryder’s message.

Four words. Simple. Deniable. The kind of thing anyone could send anyone.

Except he wasn’t anyone. And he knew it. And she knew it. And the fact that he’d sent it while she was on the phone with her boyfriend, not knowing that, having no way of knowing that, somehow made it worse and better and more complicated all at once.

She turned her phone face down.

“Mia?” Ethan’s voice in her ear.

“Sorry, still here. Tell me about the packing.”

She listened.

She was good at listening.

But her hand stayed near the phone the entire rest of the call, and the moment Ethan said goodnight and she pressed end, before she’d taken a breath, before she’d thought it through, before the reasonable part of her brain could file an objection.

She picked up the phone and typed back.

Mia: Good. Found the Okonkwo texts. Third shelf from the bottom.

She sent it.

Sat back.

Stared at the ceiling.

Three seconds passed.

Ryder: Told you.

Then, four seconds after that:

Ryder: Get some sleep, Caldwell. You look tired when you don’t.

She read it twice.

You look tired when you don’t.

He wasn’t there. He couldn’t see her. He was saying it from memory, from having looked at her enough to know what tired looked like on her face and storing it somewhere deliberate.

That was the moment.

Not the laugh in the library. Not the arm that grazed hers. Not the , almost sentence, that got cut off by her boyfriend’s ringtone.

This was the moment, sitting at her desk at 10pm with her notes spread out and Ethan’s goodnight still warm in her ear, that Mia felt the thing she’d been refusing to name settle into her chest with the quiet certainty of something that had already decided to stay.

She pressed her phone against her sternum.

Three weeks, she reminded herself.

Twenty-one days.

Get it together.

She put her phone in her drawer.

Closed it.

Opened it four minutes later and read the messages again.

Across campus Ryder sat at his desk and looked at his phone and did something he almost never did.

He waited for her reply.

It didn’t come.

He set the phone down. Opened his laptop. Pulled up his notes and read the same paragraph four times without retaining a single word.

Then he closed the laptop.

Looked at the ceiling.

Said nothing to no one.

But in the quiet of his apartment, with the city humming outside his window and the phone dark on his desk….

He smiled.

Small. Private. The kind that belonged to no one else.

Like a man who had decided to be patient.

Like a man who was very, very good at waiting for the right moment.

Like a man who had already decided the moment was coming.

What neither of them knew yet, what was sitting three days away like a collision neither could swerve from, was that Ethan wasn’t arriving in three weeks.

He was arriving Saturday.

Tomorrow.

And he was planning a surprise.