Chapter 5 The Ghost Classmate?

Victoria's POV

I set the phone down at the corner of the desk and picked the exhibition notice up again, reading the last page a second time. The joint exhibition was held every August, and the line printed inside the small rounded box at the foot of the page was the one that stopped me: names that had appeared in textbooks occasionally turned up in person.

When they did, two things could happen — you got taken on as an apprentice on the spot, or you walked away with a single sentence that changed the way you worked.

I put the notice back on the desk. Before I came to this world, I had sat in a rented room too small to hold an easel and copied the old masters' brushwork cell by cell off restoration images on a phone screen.

Those names that existed only in print, those things that lived only in low-resolution screenshots — tomorrow they might be standing in the same gallery. That was reason enough. I paid for the ticket without thinking twice.

The next morning Evelyn appeared at my bedroom door at seven sharp and reported the transport arrangements. I stood before the dressing-room mirror with my hair half tied back, in a lotus-yellow sleeveless dress, and looked at myself for two seconds before turning to go. The outfit was good-looking enough, and not so good-looking that anyone would see the price before they saw me.

"Stop at the door. Don't follow me in." By the time I said it, Evelyn had already turned and pulled the door open.

Below the steps of the Carlton Gallery, thirty-odd students stood about in twos and threes, the air carrying the smell of flagstone that had just been watered. I glanced out from the car window: the instructor, Diane Cole, was working through the roster, and she suddenly stopped and looked up toward the corner of the street. I knew that I was the last one.

Evelyn got out first, opened the black umbrella one-handed, and pulled open the door on my side. I stepped onto the flagstone, my voice even: "A few minutes lost on the road. My apologies. I'm Sterling." Diane Cole froze for half a second, then shifted from official to personal in a single breath, her shoulders dropping a degree.

I raised a hand in a light wave. Evelyn folded the umbrella, got in, and drove off, the whole sequence holding not one spare second. Behind me came the murmur — a young lady from one of the great families, surely. I heard it and kept walking. Being misidentified wasn't an offense worth correcting.

Inside the entrance the line re-formed by student number. I paused at the fork, not certain which side to take, and was just reaching for my handbook when a girl with a high ponytail leaned half her body out of the line and called across: "Sterling! Over here — your place is up at the front, don't line up wrong."

I walked over. She introduced herself as she went: Hannah Reed, the class exhibition liaison and the RA for the undergraduate women's floor. Suite 103, she said, the window room was still empty, and she had already collected the key for me in advance. Then she paused and asked, "Are you moving in when term starts?"

"I'll be back on campus." I paused. "But I won't be staying long."

Sampling student life now and then was fine; staying long-term was a punishment I had no intention of accepting. I kept that to myself. Hannah wanted one more sentence out of me and could not find the right joint to hang it on, so she let it go.

After a moment, her eyes drifted to the corner of the street where the car had just pulled away, and she could not help herself: "That just now — was that family?"

"My housekeeper."

She opened her mouth, gently swallowed the word, and said instead, "Your friend really looks out for you." Around us I heard the people who had been listening exchange a glance — that particular quality of silence that doesn't need to be seen to be known.

Once the group dispersed, I followed the handbook markings and walked on my own. The loan exhibition hall sat at the far end of Gallery Three, half a shade darker than the rest of the building and heavier with air conditioning. The master's hand-painted porcelain vase stood on its own platform — the form full, the shoulder line drawn in with great restraint, a fine crackle running across the glaze, the brushwork pressed beneath it so that the direction only revealed itself up close.

I stopped in front of it and stayed there. Only at moments like this did my own time come back to me entire — not Sterling, not whatever identity the system kept on file, but the person who had once hunched in a rented room staring at low-resolution screenshots.

A pair of male hands came out from my right side, holding a glass of iced orange juice, condensation sliding down between his fingers. Close behind my right shoulder, a voice landed, weighted with a confidence he had mistaken for consideration: "You've been standing here nearly twenty minutes. Drink something — I got it myself. Nobody else touched it."

I did not turn around. My hand stayed at my side, fingers still.

The glass hovered there, tilted slightly toward me, waiting.

Elijah's POV

Three lists lay spread across the dining table: student numbers, carpool groupings, the end-of-day assembly point. A bill newly arrived from the hospital was pinned under one corner, folded once. I did not open it. Two coughs came from the inner room; I pulled that door shut quietly, drew out a chair, sat down, and bent my head back to the roster.

The last line was her name: V. Sterling, on leave for a year. In the two semesters since enrollment, I had sent several notices and never once received a reply, long enough that the class had more or less stopped mentioning her. Tonight I had tagged her in the group without much hope — messages like that mostly sank without a trace.

The phone buzzed. Two words appeared in the group: I'll be there.

I added her name to the next day's list. The group stirred briefly — she actually replied, someone said; screenshot it for the record — and when nothing further came, they scattered again. I printed one extra handbook, cut one extra badge, and put both into the folder. It took less than three minutes. I did not examine why I bothered.

The next day I arrived forty minutes early, checked the headcount with the instructor, and confirmed the meal count. Of course, Victoria was the only one who didn't arrive now.

Two cars came around the corner: a black Bentley in front, a white Rolls-Royce roadster behind it, stopping directly at the stone steps. The voices around me rose in layers — is that the ghost classmate, someone said; that's a Rolls, said someone else — but I saw the cars first, then the umbrella, and last the person underneath it.

The surprise lasted on my face for a single beat before I looked down and went back to the roster. What I remembered afterward, though, was not the car. It was the first sentence out of her mouth — an apology timed to the minute.

A person who had not set foot in a classroom in two semesters, and her opening line was a precise accounting of how many minutes she was late. I did not know why that stopped me. I only knew that when I picked the pen back up, it pressed a little heavier on the paper than usual.

She finished speaking, raised one hand in a light wave, and the woman with the umbrella folded it, got in, and drove away. She stood where she was for two seconds, as though confirming the car was genuinely gone, and then turned to greet the instructor. Within half a second, the instructor's tone had shifted — softer by a degree — and everyone standing on those steps saw it happen. The college's position was set from that moment forward.

I stayed where I was, moving the extra handbook from one hand to the other. It was not my moment to step forward. Not yet.

After Hannah's voice carried across the entrance and the two of them had spoken, I turned around and held out the extra handbook and the temporary badge. "In case you didn't have one." Her name was on the badge, printed evenly, edges cut straight. She took it and said thank you in a voice that was cool and slightly unhurried — less like gratitude than like an entry being logged.

I stepped back and put my hand in my coat pocket. A few paces on, the word housekeeper drifted over from somewhere behind me. My stride slowed by half a step. I did not turn around.

Once the group broke up, several people caught me to ask where the meal vouchers were being handed out. I told each of them, and when I looked up, I happened to catch Brad Chadwick at the drinks table: he picked up a glass of iced orange juice with a slice of lime and switched it to his left hand, angling the forearm below his cuff outward, toward the room.

I recognized the calculation immediately. I ran the same kind of numbers myself when filling out applications and forms — I just applied them to different problems. Brad's version was simpler: whoever stood beside Victoria right now would be the most visible person in the building for the rest of the day. He carried the glass toward the loan exhibition hall at an unhurried pace, like a man walking a route he had already rehearsed.

I knew exactly what that glass was for. And I stood there with the spare handbook in my hand and did nothing, because it was not my place, and because I had learned a long time ago that inserting yourself into a situation you had no standing in was the fastest way to make it worse.