Fake it with me
She nodded once and walked away across the courtyard, and he watched her go with the quiet attention he brought to things he found genuinely interesting, and he thought about the phone notification that had changed her face, and he thought about what or who it might have been, and he thought about the version of Ava Bennett that appeared in empty practice rooms with nervous first-year students and disappeared the moment the world started watching again.
He looked back down at his history notes.
He had written, at some point during the conversation without realizing it, a single line in the margin of the page.
*Two completely different people.*
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he added thre