After school let out, the library at Westbrook had a particular quiet, the kind of quiet where pages turned, chairs scraped, and somebody’s pencil tapped out a rhythm no one else wanted to hear, and Harper had taken the same corner table for three weeks running because it was far enough from the windows that she wasn’t singing in the afternoon sun and close enough to the reference shelves to grab an atlas or a dictionary without losing her seat to the freshmen who treated the place like a gossip study hall. She had color-coded index cards spread across the table in categories that made sense to almost nobody but her, history in blue, science in green, literature in a yellow that had already started to fade from how often she'd handled the cards, and she'd been running through capital citie
