“Like I’m a victim, because I’m not. I’m a badass.”

Mary sighed, laughed a little.

Caitlin wasn’t ready for the laugh. “What?”

“We haven’t even hit the bar, and you bust out college rape.”

Caitlin opened her mouth, found an unexpected chuckle of her own.

“I missed you, Mary. Give me five minutes, I’ll meet you upstairs.”

“I can make an excuse, Caitie. You don’t have to—”

“Five minutes, and we’ll all act like it never happened.”

Mary let her escape.

Safe in the room, Caitlin pulled off her ridiculous mortarboard and gown and slumped down against the door. Her jeans met paper.

“So much for framing your diploma, dummy.”

She sat forward, then remembered her diploma and a handful of other papers lay to her left, safe and unwrinkled. She reached behind her, found an unsealed, unmarked, letter-sized envelope. She opened the flap, pulled out a handwritten note in calligrapher’s cursive on hotel stationery, no signature.

You were very brave to come back to Bloomington, Caitlin Bergman. I will keep you safe.

Caitlin stood, pulled the door open. “Damn, Mary, that was some fast pen work—”

She looked both ways, saw no one. “And I’m talking to myself like a jerk.”

*   *   *

Seconds before the elevator doors opened, she heard the party. She straightened the black sport coat she’d thrown over her dress shirt and moved toward the sounds of inebriation wafting through an ominous set of walnut double doors. She checked the text message again.

Last door on the right before the party.

Easy enough. She exited through the door marked “Roof Access,” found an unoccupied- ten-by-ten balcony under the clear night sky.

She walked to the metal railing, filled her lungs.

Soil, grass, wet leaves—the scents left from daytime rain evoked images of textbooks spread out on blankets over bright green lawns. Nine stories up, she could see half of the campus. Glowing orbs of streetlights over concrete paths through hundred-year-old trees linked the art museum, the theater complex, and the limestone towers of the library. So much limestone. She’d forgotten the old world beauty of the soft mineral, a feeling she’d only seen reproduced in Washington, D.C., much of the material pulled from the same local quarries.

A male voice interrupted her solitude. “You beat me here.”

She turned to an older African American gentleman in a Kangol trilby-style hat and a rumpled sport coat. Even if she hadn’t known Scott Canton, his outfit would have introduced him as a poetry professor.

“Thank you so much for doing this, Scott.”

He joined her at the railing. “Not at all. It’s a pleasure to see you in person rather than merely hearing your charming voice on the other end of the phone.”