The art showcase invitation came on a Tuesday.
A small card, slipped between the pages of Maya's library copy of *Principles of Economics* while she was shelving returns. Cream colored paper, hand-lettered in the slightly imperfect way that meant someone had practiced the lettering before committing to the real thing. She stood in the quiet between two shelves, the cart half-emptied beside her, and read it twice.
*You should come see my work before the critics do.*
*Saturday, 7pm, Alderton Arts Building, Room 12.*
*— L*
She smiled before she decided to.
That was the thing about Liam. He made you feel things before you'd given yourself permission to feel them. Not in a way that felt like pressure — in a way that felt like sunlight through a window you'd forgotten to open.
She tucked the card into her jacket pocket and went back to shelving.
She did not examine why she touched the edge of the card twice more before her shift ended.
---
Wednesday came.
Two-thirty, Room 204.
This time Zach was already there when she arrived.
She stopped in the doorway for just a fraction of a second — barely a pause, barely anything — before she walked in and set her bag down and unpacked her materials with the same quiet efficiency as always.
"You're early," she said.
"Two-thirty means two-thirty," he said, not looking up from his laptop.
She sat down.
Something about the room felt different today. Smaller, maybe. Or the same size but more aware of itself. The October light came through the tall windows at a lower angle now, turning everything amber and considered, the kind of light that made ordinary things look like they meant something.
She opened her notebook.
"I saw the correction," she said.
A pause. His typing didn't stop. "What correction?"
"In the shared document. The misattributed statistic."
His typing stopped.
"You found it before I did," she continued, keeping her voice even. "You fixed it without saying anything."
He looked up then. His expression was its usual careful composition — arranged, unreadable, giving nothing for free.
"It was a small error," he said.
"It would have cost us marks."
"Yes."
"You could have just flagged it. Left a comment. Made it a whole thing."
"I don't make things a whole thing."
She held his gaze. "Why didn't you mention it in the meeting?"
A beat.
"You'd already left," he said.
Which was true. She had left to meet Liam. He had stayed. He had found the error after she was gone and fixed it in the quiet of the empty room, and had said nothing about it the next day or the day after.
She thought about saying thank you.
She thought about what thank you would mean coming from her mouth to his ears in this amber-lit room.
"Don't do that again," she said instead.
He blinked. Fractionally. "Don't correct errors in our shared work?"
"Don't correct things without telling me. I need to know what changed and why. This is a joint project — your edits affect my sections." She paused. "Even when they're right."
He studied her for a moment.
"Especially when they're right," he said slowly, like he was testing the shape of the sentence.
"Especially then," she confirmed.
Something shifted in the room. Not dramatically — not the way things shifted in films, with swelling music and significant looks. Just quietly. The way a window settles in its frame when the temperature changes.
"Fine," he said.
"Fine," she said.
They opened their laptops.
---
They worked for ninety minutes.
It was becoming a pattern she wasn't sure how to feel about — this working silence that wasn't uncomfortable, that had its own rhythm, its own texture. He asked sharp questions when he had them and didn't manufacture conversation when he didn't. She respected that more than she wanted to.
At four o'clock he stood up and went to the window.
She hadn't seen him do that before — step away from the work, just stand somewhere without purpose. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the courtyard below where students crossed in their afternoon patterns, small and purposeful from this height.
She kept working.
After a moment he said, without turning around: "You're going to the art showcase."
It wasn't a question.
She looked up. "How do you know that?"
"Liam Park mentioned it in the hall this morning. To someone. I happened to hear."
*Happened to hear.* She let that sit.
"Yes," she said. "I'm going."
He said nothing. Kept looking out the window.
"Are you going?" she asked, and immediately wasn't sure why she'd asked.
A pause.
"I wasn't planning to," he said.
"Okay," she said, and looked back at her notes.
"Art showcases aren't really—" he started.
"You don't have to explain yourself," she said mildly. "I asked a simple question."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"What time does it start?" he said.
She kept her eyes on her page. "Seven. Saturday. Alderton Arts Building."
He said nothing else. Came back to the table. Sat down. Opened his laptop.
She did not look up.
She did not smile.
She came very close to both.
---
Saturday arrived soft and grey, the kind of New York autumn day that smelled like rain that hadn't committed yet. Maya spent the afternoon in the campus library — her shift ended at five — and then went back to the apartment to change and found Bea sitting cross-legged on her bed with an expression that meant she had opinions.
"Where are you going?" Bea said.
"Art showcase. Liam's work is being displayed."
Bea's expression upgraded its opinion status. "Just Liam's work?"
"Yes."
"You changed your shirt."
"This shirt was cleaner."
"Maya."
"Bea."
They looked at each other.
"I'm going to support my friend's art," Maya said firmly.
"In your good earrings."
Maya touched her ear involuntarily. "These are my only earrings."
"They're gold."
"They were my mother's."
Bea held up both hands in surrender but kept the expression. Maya picked up her jacket, kissed the top of Bea's head because she couldn't help it, and left before any more observations could be made.
---
The arts building at seven on a Saturday had a different energy than the rest of the week — warm-lit and loosely buzzing, students and a handful of faculty moving between displayed works with the particular reverence people reserve for things they don't fully understand but want to.
Maya found Liam near his section immediately.
He saw her first. His whole face opened up the way it did — unguarded, unperformed, the most honest face she knew.
"You came," he said.
"I came," she said.
"I wasn't sure if—" he stopped himself. Smiled. "Never mind. Come look."
His work was extraordinary.
She hadn't expected — well. She wasn't sure what she'd expected. She knew he was talented. She'd seen the small sketches in his notebooks, the paint on his jacket, the way he looked at things as if he was already composing them into something else.
But this was different.
Six large canvases. All of them cityscapes — New York in all its moods, but painted from below, from the ground looking up, the buildings like canyon walls around small human figures who were rendered with extraordinary care. You could see their faces. Each one distinct, each one carrying something — a grocery bag, a phone, a child's hand, a folded newspaper. Small lives made enormous by the attention paid to them.
Maya stood in front of the largest canvas for a long time.
It was the subway entrance near her apartment building. She recognized it immediately — the particular angle of the railing, the way the light fell from the street. And in the corner of the canvas, barely visible, a small figure with a rolling suitcase.
She turned to Liam.
He was watching her with the particular expression of someone who has been waiting to be understood.
"Liam," she said softly.
"It's not — I mean, it could be anyone with a suitcase," he said quickly.
"It's me."
"It might be you."
"It's me," she said again, and her voice was warm and careful at the same time.
He looked at his shoes briefly. Then back at her. "What do you think?"
"I think you see things other people don't," she said honestly. "I think that's a rare and beautiful thing."
The smile that came across his face then was slow and real and slightly devastated in the way that meant he felt something he wasn't going to say yet.
She looked back at the canvas.
She felt the warmth of him beside her — steady and uncomplicated and good — and told herself that was enough. That warmth like this was enough. That she should want warmth like this.
---
She was standing at the refreshments table twenty minutes later, plastic cup of terrible punch in hand, when someone appeared at her left side.
Not Liam. The energy was entirely different — broader, easier, carrying itself like it had never once doubted its welcome.
"You're Maya Santos," the boy said.
She turned.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. The kind of face that was so straightforwardly good-looking it was almost inconvenient. Basketball player's build — she'd find out later how right she was — with an easy smile that had probably never needed to work very hard.
"I am," she said.
"Cole Donovan." He extended his hand like it was the most natural thing in the world, no hesitation, no performance. Just warmth offered freely. "I've been trying to figure out how to introduce myself for about a week."
She shook his hand. "A week."
"You're hard to catch alone. You're always with the art kid or you're in the library or you're in that room on the second floor of Alderton with—" he stopped. Recalibrated slightly. "Anyway. Hi."
She almost laughed. "Hi."
"Can I get you something that isn't that punch? Because I tried it and I think it might be a chemical compound."
This time she did laugh — short, surprised, real. "It's really bad."
"Criminally bad." He nodded at the small café table near the window. "There's coffee. Actual coffee. The art department has good taste in at least one thing."
She looked at him for a moment. Open face. Easy manner. Nothing calculated in it — or if there was, it was buried very deep beneath something that felt genuinely warm.
"Okay," she said.
They moved to the coffee.
They talked.
It was easy in the way she always imagined it should be — fluid, funny, real. He was a senior, basketball captain, Sports Science major, from Chicago originally, missed deep-dish pizza with a passion he described as spiritual. He asked about her with the specific quality of someone actually listening to the answers, not just waiting for his turn to speak.
She found herself smiling without calculating it.
---
Across the room, Liam watched.
Not with hostility. Liam didn't do hostility. With the quiet observational sadness of someone cataloguing a feeling for later, the way he catalogued everything — carefully, for the record, because feelings deserved to be witnessed even when they cost you something.
He looked at Maya laughing with Cole Donovan.
Then he looked at his canvas in the corner. The small figure with the suitcase.
He picked up his cup of terrible punch and drank it.
---
Later, walking home in the grey October night, Maya had her hands in her jacket pockets and the city around her and two things sitting in her chest that she was trying to keep separate.
Liam's painting. The small figure with the suitcase. The way he'd said *it might be you* with that look on his face.
Cole's laugh. The way he'd said *I've been trying to figure out how to introduce myself for about a week* without any shame about it, like wanting something and saying so was the most natural thing in the world.
She walked three blocks before she admitted to herself what the third thing was.
She had looked at the door of the arts building twice.
Not consciously. Not deliberately. Just — looked. The way you look at something you told yourself you weren't expecting and find yourself expecting anyway.
Zach had not come.
*I wasn't planning to,* he'd said.
And he hadn't.
Which was fine. Which was exactly what he said would happen. Which meant nothing except that a person had said a thing and done the thing they said, which was in fact the bare minimum of human reliability.
She turned her collar up against the wind.
Fine.
She was three blocks from home when her phone buzzed.
A message from an unsaved number — except she'd saved it, she'd saved it as *Z* and she knew it immediately.
She stopped walking.
Stood on the pavement with the city moving around her.
Opened the message.
It said: *How was it.*
Not a question mark. Not *how was the showcase* or *how was Liam's work.* Just: *how was it.* Like he'd been thinking about asking and had stripped it down to the smallest possible version before sending.
She stared at it for a long time.
Typed: Good.
Deleted it.
Typed: His work was beautiful.
Deleted that too.
Stood there in the cold with the unsent message blinking.
Then she typed: *You should have come.*
And sent it before she could take it back.
She put the phone in her pocket and walked the last three blocks home and did not take it out again until she was inside with the door closed.
His reply was waiting.
Three words.
She read them.
Sat down on her bed slowly.
Outside, Bea called from the kitchen asking if she wanted tea, and Maya said yes, she did, and her voice came out completely normal, which was remarkable, given what was on her screen.
She read the three words one more time.
Maybe I should.
End of Chapter 4