Chapter 1: The Reluctant Arrangement

Elara Hayes had learned, in the two years since Caleb, to read rooms before she entered them.

She stood at the library door now, scanning. Four tables occupied. A sophomore with earbuds in, asleep over his textbook. Two girls from her AP English class, already laughing at something on one of their phones. A boy she didn't recognise near the far window. And then — at the last table in the back row, in the chair that caught the most shadow — Leo Carter, already there, already pretending to read.

She took the table closest to the door.

It wasn't the arrangement Ms Harland had described. Ms Harland had described a partnership. She had used that word with the practiced cheer of someone who had said it many times and stopped meaning it long ago — "A productive cross-subject partnership, Elara, given that Leo is excelling in calculus and you're excelling in literature." She had smiled at both of them across her desk like she was presenting a gift. Leo had not smiled back. Elara had said thank you while thinking: this is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a disaster.

She opened her annotated copy of Middlemarch and did not look up.

Leo noticed the new arrival the way he noticed most things these days: as a fact to file and ignore.

Girl. Junior, probably. Sat by the door. Opened a book with a lot of handwriting in the margins. Not a threat. Not a variable.

He returned to his calculus problem set, but the number in front of him had been the same number for eleven minutes. He knew this because he could see the clock on the library wall between the stacks, and because counting minutes was something he had started doing after Nora — a habit he didn't want and couldn't stop. It had been fourteen months, two weeks, and three days since the funeral. Not that he was keeping track. Just that the number was there, the way certain facts were there, whether you wanted them or not.

The problem set had forty questions. He had done three.

He wrote a 4 in the margin, crossed it out, wrote it again.

Elara was on page forty-seven of Middlemarch — she'd read it before, twice, so she wasn't really reading, she was using it as a kind of wall — when she heard the chair drag.

She didn't look up.

She heard the chair settle. Then silence. Then the sound of papers being set down on her table, which was her table, which she had specifically chosen because it was the table no reasonable person would need to share at four-thirty on a Tuesday.

She looked up.

Leo Carter was sitting across from her. He had put a calculus textbook, a green mechanical pencil, and a single sheet of paper in front of him. He was looking at the middle distance somewhere past her right shoulder, expression unreadable, jaw set like he had already committed to not enjoying this.

"Ms Harland said Wednesday," Elara said.

"I know." He didn't look at her.

"It's Tuesday."

"I know." A pause. "I had nothing else to do."

That was, she thought, perhaps the most honest thing anyone had said to her in months. She didn't know what to do with it.

"Elara," she said, because it felt strange not to.

He looked at her then — for the first time, actually looked, rather than aimed his gaze slightly past her. His eyes were dark, a little too tired for someone their age, and there was something in them that she recognized without being able to name.

"I know," he said again. Then, after a moment, like he'd remembered what came next: "Leo."

"I know," she said.

Everyone knew Leo Carter. He was the boy who had been perfect until he wasn't — straight As, captain of the debate team, the kid teachers held up as an example — and then, fourteen months ago, something changed. He still got straight As. He still showed up. But the debate team thing was done. He ate lunch alone. He moved through the school like he was walking in a building no one else could see.

She understood that architecture, actually. She had built something similar herself.

She looked back down at her book. He looked back at his problem set.

Outside, the October light slid lower across the library floor and turned the dust on the shelves briefly gold. Neither of them spoke for thirty-seven minutes. At some point Elara stopped using Middlemarch as a wall and started actually reading it. At some point Leo solved four problems in a row without looking at the clock.

Neither of them noticed when the other one started to relax.

That, in the end, was the only way it could have started.

Chapter 1 of Pages and Quiet Healing. New chapters daily.