Cindy Bennett didn't come to Harrington for friends or fun — she came for one thing: a way out. Scholarship girl from Queens, two-job mother, a five-year plan tighter than her budget. Then there's William Cole — heir to a name bolted to the side of a campus building, the kind of guy who's never had to park twice.They're not supposed to like each other. They're really not supposed to get assigned as partners on the project worth forty percent of their grade.What starts as hostile note-swapping in a library that closes at 11pm turns into something neither of them planned for — bad coffee, late-night honesty, an almost-touch he doesn't finish. Then a symposium upstate. A terrace. A conversation with no front row to perform from.Then her world cracks open. A folder she wasn't supposed to find. A signature on the bottom of a contract that gutted her father's business years before she could spell Cole Industries. Suddenly the boy she's falling for is standing on the wreckage of her family, and he doesn't even know it.She doesn't wait to be rescued. She builds her own case, fights her own battle, walks into his father's office and makes the man wait forty minutes just to sit across from him.Some things break clean. Some things don't break at all — they just bend, slow, into something new.His phone buzzes in his pocket at the end. His father's name on the screen.He doesn't check it yet.