They practiced their presentation in an empty seminar room that smelled faintly of paint and old chalk. Emma read while Ethan timed her and made notes she pretended didn't matter to her as much as they did.
"Again," he said when she finished. "You look at the floor on 'erodes.' That's the point; don't apologize for it."
"I don't apologize," she said, bristling. "I prepare."
"Then prepare to be looked at," he said. "You're worth looking at."
Her heart misfired. He said it as if reciting a measurement.
"And you," she said, "weaponize pauses like a lawyer. Be human."
A corner of his mouth lifted. "I'm trying."
They were eighteen minutes into arguing about where to place a Keats excerpt when the door swung open. Sienna leaned on the frame, bored and beautiful. "I knocked," she lied. "The building answered."
Emma's spine went straight. Ethan's jaw went sharp.
"Harper wants the alumni board brief," Sienna said, sliding a folder onto the desk. "And your father wants your RSVP to the Fisher deal celebration. Friday. Don't be late."
"I'll be where I need to be," Ethan said, without specifying whether the need was his.
Sienna's gaze cut to Emma. "Careful, darling. His world eats generous girls as a snack."
Emma swallowed. "And yours?"
"Oh," Sienna said sweetly, "I don't snack."
When she left, the room felt larger and meaner. Ethan stared at the closed door as if he could will it into becoming something else.
"Ex?" Emma asked, tone deliberately mild.
"Past tense," he said. "And irrelevant."
"Nothing about her is irrelevant to you," Emma said. "Which is… fine. But don't pretend the ghosts aren't in the room."
"Are yours?" His eyes found hers, pinning. "Ghosts."
"One or two," she said. "They're polite. They just rattle cupboards when I'm alone too long."
They worked until dusk. On the way out, Emma slipped on the final step, catching herself with a palm on the banister. Her wrist shrieked a complaint she refused to voice.
Ethan heard it anyway. "You're hurt."
"I'm fine," she said through her teeth, which, as everyone knows, is the password for I am not fine.
He took her hand—quickly, carefully—turning it over in his palms like a precious thing he was afraid he'd break. The contact was small and catastrophic. His thumb brushed the thin swelling. He looked up, eyes darker.
"You should ice this."
"You should stop touching it," she managed.
He let go. The loss of warmth felt like stepping out of a sunbeam you hadn't realized was there.
"I'll walk you home," he said.
"You'll hover outside like a hawk," she said. "Which is not… unwelcome, surprisingly."
He didn't smile. "I don't want you hurt."
"You will hurt me," she said, not accusing, not pleading, only stating a fact that felt old as weather.
He closed his eyes like someone hearing a prophecy he wished to rewrite. "I will try not to."
On her bed later, Sophie taped a bag of frozen peas to Emma's wrist with the gravity of a surgeon and the profanity of a sailor. "If he so much as breathes wrong at you, I will break his expensive nose with my inexpensive shoe."
Emma laughed and then didn't. Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Unknown: You didn't heed the first warning.
She turned the phone face down and stared at the ceiling until the crack in the paint looked like a map