The common room was empty when I got there.
Good. I needed that. I sat on the couch by the window and did the thing where you breathe deliberately and try to look like a person who has their life together, which I'd gotten pretty decent at over the last few weeks, and waited.
Jake came in at seven on the dot. He saw me and something moved across his face — there and adjusted before I could name it.
"You came," I said.
"You sound surprised."
"I'm not." I was a little. "Figured you had better things to do on a Tuesday."
He looked around the room. The flickering light. The dead plant that someone kept watering for reasons that escaped me. The mint bowl on the coffee table that had been there since orientation and would probably outlive us both.
"Hard to imagine," he said, and sat on th
