Belle's POV
I didn't reply to the unknown number. I thought about it for two days, which is the same as thinking about it constantly while pretending to do other things. I turned the message over in different directions trying to find the angle that made it less strange and I couldn't find one. Someone has my number, they know about Jasmine, and they decided I was the right person to contact about it. That last part is what I keep getting stuck on. Not Jasmine directly. Me. Like I'm supposed to do something with the information. Like they think I have some kind of influence over how she moves.
I don't know yet if that's accurate.
I saved the number under no name and I have not mentioned it to Jasmine and I walked into the library on Friday with that sitting quietly in the back of my head alongside everything else I'm currently not examining, and Ethan was already there, same table, same coffee, and I sat down and opened my notebook and that was supposed to be the whole shape of the evening.
Then I read the methodology section he drafted.
"This approach won't hold," I say. I mean to say it more carefully than that, with some setup, some acknowledgment of the work, but the problem is clear enough that the words come out direct and I don't pull them back.
He looks up from his notes. "Which part."
"The variable isolation. You're assuming a controlled environment but the sourcing for that assumption is one paper from 2019 and the sample size was fourteen." I turn my notebook around and show him the section I've been annotating since Thursday. "If Calloway checks the methodology, which she will, this doesn't hold up to a challenge."
He looks at my annotations. He takes his time doing it. "The Veracruz study backs it," he says.
"The Veracruz study is about a different compound class."
"The principle applies."
"The principle is adjacent," I say. "That's not the same as applies."
He looks at me for a moment. Not with irritation. With the same direct steadiness he brings to everything, like he's measuring something and taking his time about it. "You're wrong," he says. Not unkindly. Not with any particular force. Just as a statement of fact, the way you'd say it's raining, because from where he's standing it is.
Something happens in my chest that I'm not sure what to do with. Nobody in my life says that to me. Not like that. Not without softening it first, not without checking my face to see how I'm receiving it, not without the careful architecture of people who are aware of the name I carry and make adjustments accordingly. He says it like the name doesn't factor in. Like the only thing in the room is the argument and he's interested in whether it holds up.
I flip to the second page of my notes. "Show me the principle applying," I say.
So he does.
We go back and forth for forty-five minutes. He cites the Veracruz study properly this time and I read the section he references and I see what he means and I still don't think it's sufficient and I tell him that and he explains his reasoning in three sentences without repeating himself or getting louder and I come back with the counter and he comes back with the counter to that. It is the most actual conversation I've had in AP Chemistry all semester, and none of it is about anything except whether the methodology stands, and at some point I stop thinking about my father and the unknown number and Jasmine's careful performances and I'm just here, in the argument, following it forward.
At eight o'clock I should leave. I have a seven-thirty curfew my father has never formalized in words but which is enforced through the specific quality of his silence when I come home past it. I am fifteen minutes late and I know it and I stay anyway because I have not proved my point yet.
At nine I have not proved my point. I have also not been proved wrong, which is different, and which I am holding onto with both hands.
"The isolation variable," I say for what is probably the fourth time.
"Which I've sourced from three papers now," he says. He's leaning forward on his elbows, his pen tapping once against the table like a clock. He's not tired. That's the thing that's been getting under my skin for the last two hours, how not tired he is. I am used to people getting tired when I push back. I am used to people folding or getting defensive or finding a reason to agree with me so the thing can be over. He doesn't do any of that. He just stays there in the argument like there's no other place he's supposed to be.
I look at the three sources. I go through them properly. The third one is more solid than I initially credited and I know it the moment I finish reading the abstract and I sit with that knowledge for a moment before I say anything.
"The third paper is stronger than the first two," I say. "I'll concede that."
"But not the conclusion."
"Not yet." I close my notebook. The library is nearly empty around us, which means time has passed in the way it does when you're not counting it, and my phone has a notification I've been ignoring for the last forty minutes that I am almost certain is my father's assistant.
I put on my jacket. I pack up slowly, the same way I always do when I'm not ready to stop being somewhere. He watches me do it without comment.
"Friday," I say.
"Friday," he says.
I walk out of the library and down the steps and onto Meridian and I walk home the long way, which adds twelve minutes and which I don't decide consciously, I just find myself going the wrong direction and don't correct it. There is something moving in my chest the whole way home, a live, restless thing, and I don't name it but I don't try to press it flat either and that in itself is new.
My phone has two missed calls from my father's number.
Not his assistant. Him.
I stand outside the building and look at the screen and think about the unknown message and the car on Tuesday night and the fact that both calls came in during the last twenty minutes, while I was losing track of time across a table from someone who told me I was wrong and made me want to prove it for ninety extra minutes.
I call him back.
He picks up before the first ring finishes.
"Inside," he says. "Now."