Elara's POV
It started with something small.
I had been paying attention for over a week now, the way I had promised myself I would, quietly and without making it obvious, watching the pattern of him the way you watched something you were trying to understand rather than catch, and what I was seeing had built into something I could not keep explaining away with the comfortable reasoning I had been reaching for.
That was the thing that kept coming back to me as the week went on, the simple fact that nobody at a boarding school came and went the way he did, with that level of consistency and that level of ease, and the more I sat with it the less it looked like something that had a simple explanation and the more it looked like something that had been carefully maintained.
Students live
