Belle's POV
I left Tuesday night without answering Mia's question. I picked up my bag and said Friday to Ethan and gave Mia a small nod that wasn't an answer to anything and walked out of the library and down the steps and didn't stop moving until I was two blocks away. I told myself the question didn't require an answer because it was asked by a nine-year-old who doesn't understand what she's asking. I told myself that for two days and I'm still telling myself that now, Thursday afternoon, standing in the school library with a cart full of returns and the kind of silence I came here specifically to find.
This is the one place I don't perform anything. That's the truth of it. Crestview Academy's library is not the Meridian branch, it doesn't have the same warmth, but it has the same principle: things belong in specific places and when they aren't there something is wrong and I can fix it. I don't know when that started mattering to me. I've been doing this every Thursday for two years and I've never tried to explain it to anyone because the explanation would require me to say out loud that I find order comforting, that I find quiet comforting, that the version of me who moves through Crestview's hallways and sits across from her father at dinner and manages Jasmine's careful measurements is not the only version there is, and I'm not ready to hand that information to anyone.
Jasmine has never asked about my Thursdays. I've never told her. She thinks I have a standing appointment with my college counselor, which is true on alternating weeks and which I let cover the other weeks without correcting it. It's not a lie exactly. It's just a space I kept for myself.
I work through the fiction section first because it needs the most work. Students pull novels off the shelf and return them anywhere, by color sometimes, by size, by some internal logic that has nothing to do with the catalog system. I find a biography shelved in romance, two poetry collections spine-in facing the wall, and a dictionary that someone has placed horizontally on top of the row like a roof.
I fix all of it. It takes forty minutes and I don't mind.
The science section is next because the science section is always next on Thursdays, because the science section always needs the most correction and I've understood for a while now that this is not random. Someone uses this section consistently and returns books from memory rather than reading the spine numbers and I have been correcting the same small cluster of misplacements every week for months.
I know whose it is. I've known for longer than I've been willing to admit.
Today the section has more displacement than usual. Three titles from the physical chemistry shelf are on the biology shelf. Two more are reversed, spine inward. One is on the floor behind the cart, which means it was dropped and not retrieved, which means whoever left it was in a hurry or distracted or both.
I pick up the one on the floor first. It's a paperback, library copy, more worn than the others. I turn it over and check the spine and put it in the correct slot on the cart. Then I notice the corner.
Dog-eared. A deliberate fold at the top right of one page, about a third of the way through. Not an accident. Someone marked this place on purpose.
I open to the folded page.
There's a passage underlined in pencil. Light and careful, the kind of line you draw when you're not sure you have permission to leave a mark. I read it once because it's in front of me and I'm holding the book and it would require deliberate effort not to read it.
It's about two people who keep choosing safety over honesty until the cost of safety becomes higher than the cost of telling the truth. It's underlined from the first sentence to the last, the whole paragraph, nothing left out.
I look at the handwriting.
I know it. I've been looking at it across a library table twice a week for the last two and a half weeks. Main point, then example, then a question mark next to things worth returning to. Small and careful, like he's not sure he has permission to take up space on the page.
My hands are very still.
I close the book. I check the catalog number on the spine. I place it in the correct position on the cart. I stand there with my hand still on the spine for a moment that is longer than necessary.
He reads here. Not at Meridian, here, at the school library, in the science section. He uses the free periods I know he has because I've seen him in this building when he should technically be elsewhere. He sits in the section I volunteer in every Thursday, which means he's been here during my shifts and I've been correcting his displacements without knowing they were his, and he has been underlining passages in library books about people who choose safety over honesty, and I am standing here in the quiet with that information and no idea what to do with it.
I finish the science section. I work through two more rows and I do it carefully and I do not think about the underlined passage and I am not succeeding at either of those things.
At five-fifteen the library starts to empty. Students packing up, chairs scraping, the low hum of the space shifting toward closing. I return the cart to the front desk and sign out and pick up my bag, and I'm almost at the door when the librarian calls me back.
"Someone left this at the desk," she says. "Said to give it to the Thursday volunteer." She holds out a folded piece of paper.
I look at it. Then at her. She shrugs pleasantly and goes back to her screen.
I take the paper. I unfold it in the doorway.
One line. His handwriting. The same small careful script from the underlined passage.
The Hargrove paper has a problem. Page 12. Tell me I'm wrong on Friday.
I read it twice. Then I fold it exactly in half and put it in my bag and stand in the doorway while the library empties around me and try to understand why those twelve words feel more like something than anything anyone has said to me in months.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown number. The same one from before.
Does she know you're there on Thursdays.