All Chapters of The space between the wrong : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The door to Seminar Room 114 is heavier than it looks.I find that out the hard way, pushing with my shoulder when it only needed a pull, and I have exactly one second to be embarrassed about it before I look up and see him.Cole Whitfield.Sitting at the round table like he belongs there, which he does, because apparently the universe has a sense of humor I never accounted for.He sees me at the same time. I know because his whole body goes still — not the freeze of someone caught doing something wrong, but the stillness of someone who has been waiting for something they weren’t sure was coming. His hands stop moving around the cap of his water bottle. His eyes find mine across the room and they stay there.I look away first.I pick a seat. Not across from him — I’m not doing that to myself on the first day — but not beside him either. The table is round, so there’s no perfect answer, but I find something close to neutral and I sit down. I put my bag on the floor. I take out my noteb

“What did he say?”I type it before I think about it. Then I stare at the words on the screen and wish I could take them back, not because I don’t want to know, but because wanting to know is already a problem.Theo takes forty seconds to reply. I count them.just asked if i was your brother. said he recognized the last name. then said hey, take care of yourself or something like that. weird guyI put my phone face down on the windowsill.Forty-eight hours ago I was in a different city with a clean life and a research proposal and zero reasons to think about Cole Whitfield before bed. Now he’s talked to my brother, he’s in my seminar, and I’m standing at a window in the dark doing exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t do.I pick the phone back up.He’s in my program, I type to Theo. Just ignore him if you see him again.Theo sends back a question mark and then: wait WHATI turn the phone over again. I’ll explain later. Or never. One of those.Here is what actually happened. Not th

“The library or the campus cafe?”I send it Tuesday morning and stare at my phone for longer than I should. It’s a practical question. It means nothing. I am asking where to meet to discuss a research project with my assigned partner. That is the entire content of this situation.Cole replies in four minutes.Library works. Third floor? Two o’clock?I put the phone down.He said third floor. He doesn’t know that’s my floor. He can’t know that. The third floor is just quieter than the others and he’s a graduate student who probably figured that out the same way I did. It means nothing.Fine, I type back. See you then.I get there at 1:55 and he’s already at a table near the window. Not my corner table. A different one, more central, with two chairs across from each other and enough space between them that nobody could call it intimate. He has a notebook open and a pen in his hand and he’s reading something on his laptop when I walk up.He sees me before I say anything. Closes the lapto

“Do you know him?”Theo is watching my face with the specific attention of a younger sibling who has spent eighteen years learning to read me.“Not well,” I say.It’s true. I don’t know Dex Harrow. I know what he did and I know why and I know the shape of him but I have never had a real conversation with the man. He existed at the edges of my life for eight months and then he blew the whole thing up from there.“He’s been around the residence a lot,” Theo says. “Like, more than seems normal for a third-year.”“He probably knows people there.”“Maybe.” Theo looks back at the group. “He came and talked to me yesterday. Asked how I was settling in. Asked if my sister was in the graduate program.”The drink in my hand is cold and I hold it tighter.“What did you say?”“I said yeah, you were in COGS. He said oh interesting, small world.” Theo pauses. “He seemed really friendly. But something felt off. I don’t know how to explain it.”“Trust that feeling,” I say.Theo looks at me. “Nora.”“

I don’t reply to the last message.Not because I don’t have something to say. Because I have too much and none of it belongs in a text thread at ten-fifteen on a Friday night.He had no business talking to you.I read it four more times before I put my phone face down on my nightstand and stare at the ceiling. The thing about that sentence is the weight behind it. Not anger exactly. Something more specific. The particular tone of someone who has been sitting with a suspicion long enough that it has become a conviction.He suspects Dex.Maybe he has suspected for a while.I don’t know what to do with that. The girl I was at nineteen would have felt something uncomplicated about it, relief maybe, or vindication. The person I am now just lies here and turns it over carefully like something that could still cut.Suspicion is not the same as knowing. And knowing is not the same as what he should have done two years ago, which was not suspect me in the first place.I close my eyes.I open t