"You are going to text him."
"I don't have his number," I said.
"Then find him."
"Zara."
"Marcelin."
"I am not going to go and find a man I spoke to once at a party. That is something a strange person does."
"You have picked up your phone and put it back down eleven times in the last twenty minutes," she said. "I counted. A strange person does that."
I had not realized she was counting. I turned my phone screen down on the library table, then opened my textbook to a page I had already read like three times and understood nothing but pretended to be very interested in it.
Zara reached across and turned my phone screen up.
"Stop," I said.
"I am not doing anything," she said. "I am just making sure it is visible. In case someone texts you."
"Nobody is going to text me."
"Nobody is going to text you because you do not have his number and you are both just going to sit on opposite sides of this campus being ridiculous until one of you does something about it."
"Or," I said, "nothing happens and I focus on my studies and become a doctor and live a long and productive life."
Zara looked at me the way you look at someone who has just said something very stupid.
"Go and find him," she said.
"I am not going to find him. I do not even know where he is."
Zara smiled. Slow and satisfied, like a person who had just been waiting for that exact sentence.
"I knew it," she said.
"Knew what."
"I knew it from the rooftop. The moment you said it was nothing. You always say something is nothing when it is very clearly something."
I had said nothing. Which, I realized too late, was basically confirming everything.
She found him for me.
I did not ask her to do this and I didn't even know she was doing it. I was in the bathroom for four minutes and when I came back she was putting my phone back on the table with the look of someone who had just done something they were very pleased about.
"What did you do," I said.
"I found his friend Josh on social media," she said. "Josh had a public page. Ethan was tagged in a post from last week. The post mentioned that Ethan studies at the university library on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between two and four."
I stared at her.
"It is Thursday," she said. "It is half past one."
"Zara. That is strange behaviour."
"That is smart behaviour. There is a difference."
"There is absolutely not a difference."
"Go," she said. She was already packing up her things like the conversation was over, which it was not and she knew this, which explains why she was doing all this.
"I am not going to walk into a library and pretend to run into someone by accident," I said. "I have my dignity."
"You have been picking up your phone for twenty minutes," she said. "Go."
I went anyway.
I told myself I was going because I needed a book from that library. A specific book. For a specific reason and by chance that the book happened to be in the same library where Ethan Cole studied on Thursday afternoons.
I was absolutely going because of him.
The library was big, three floors, and for one horrible moment I thought Zara had been wrong and he was not there and I had walked twenty minutes across campus in the cold for nothing. I felt the exact kind of embarrassment of a person who has done something brave and been met with an empty room.
And then I saw him.
Second floor. Corner table. Head down, pen in hand, a stack of books beside him that made my reading list look small. He had not seen me yet.
I stood there for a moment.
I could leave. I could turn around right now and walk back out and text Zara that he was not there and she would never know the difference. I could do that. That was an option.
I took a breath.
I walked over.
"Is this seat taken?" I said.
He looked up. And the moment he saw me, before he said a single word, he smiled. Not a polite smile. Not a surprised smile. Just a real, warm one, like seeing me was the most natural thing in the world.
"It is now," he said.
I sat down. I took out my books. I told myself this was fine, this was normal, two people studying in the same library, nothing strange about it at all.
We studied in silence for a while. I had never been so aware of another person sitting across from me in my entire life.
An hour passed. Maybe more. At some point he reached across the table and without saying a word, slid a piece of paper towards me.
I looked down at it.
Ten digits. His number. And underneath, in a small neat handwriting, four words that made my heart do something I was not prepared for.
In case you get lost.
I looked up at him. He was already looking back at his books, like he had not just done that, like it was nothing.
I looked back down at the paper.
I folded it carefully and put it in my pocket and told myself to breathe.
Something had just started.
I just did not know yet how it was going to end.