"You don't have to do this," Connie said. Not as a way out. Just as a truth.
"I know," Mia said.
"But you're going to."
"Yes."
Connie nodded. She cupped Mia's face in both hands for a moment. Looked at her the way grandmothers look when they are trying to memorize you. Then she let go.
"Call me Sunday," she said.
"I will."
Connie got back in the car. She didn't wave. She didn't look back. She just drove.
And Mia watched the taillights until they were gone. And then she picked up her bags and walked toward the building that was going to be her home now.
She didn't know anyone here. She didn't have a roommate waiting. She had a single room in Aldrich Hall, granted because the housing office had nowhere else to put a mid-semester transfer. She had a class schedule she'd mapped three times on the drive there. She had a meal plan card, and a campus map, and a student ID with a photo that looked nothing like her.
And she had the ribbon.
That was enough to start.
The first three days passed the way first days always pass when you are alone in a new place. You learn the geography. You learn which paths are fastest and which dining halls are quietest. You find the corners where you can sit without your back to the door. You watch.
Mia was a watcher. Had been since she was small. Her mother used to say it like a compliment.
"You see things, baby. Most people look. You actually see."
She saw that the coffee line in the west dining hall moved faster in the morning if you went before 7:15. She saw that the library's third floor, east wing, was almost always empty between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. She saw that the walking path between Aldrich Hall and the science building cut past a small garden that no one seemed to use, where there was a bench under an oak tree that caught the afternoon light in a way that felt, briefly, like something close to calm.
She also saw Reese Hartwell, on her second day.
She would have noticed him regardless. He was the kind of person who made sure of that. Tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of jaw that looked like it had been designed by a committee. He moved through the campus the way people move when they've never once had to wonder whether they were welcome somewhere. Like every hallway had been built for him specifically.