Strange to be at loose ends on a Saturday. If she was home, she’d either be working or catching up on all the personal errands that got relegated to the weekends. Sitting around felt wasteful. Unproductive. Frustrating.

She drummed her finger against her knee and surveyed the leaden sky through the window.

A hike around the grounds could be useful—but braving the biting wind and the hint of ice in the air held zero appeal. Mom’s fault. The Athens-born matriarch of the Reilly family had passed on her preference for warm, sunny Mediterranean weather to her firstborn.

So why not save the outdoor activity for tomorrow? Give the textbooks for the classes she’d be taking another pass?

Especially trigonometry.

Math may have been a breeze back in high school, but cosines and secants felt like a foreign language at this stage of her life. Putting in a few hours over the weekend on—

The door opened, and a slender teen with cornrows and guarded brown eyes entered, toting a bulging duffel bag.

Her roommate.

Last she’d heard, though, the girl wasn’t expected until tomorrow.

But having an extra day to get acquainted before classes began was a bonus.

“Hey.” The girl stopped inside the door, lowered the duffel to the floor, and gave her a cautious once-over.

“Hey.” She stayed where she was. “You must be Kayla.”

No question about it.

Her “father’s” request that she be paired with a diverse roommate to broaden her exposure to other demographics and enhance her ethnic sensitivity had almost guaranteed she’d be assigned to bunk with Kayla Harris, given the limited minority population in the student body.

The very same Kayla who’d been Stephanie’s roommate during the other girl’s short tenure—and who now had an empty bed in her room.

“Yeah. You’re Cate, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They told me your name at check-in. When did you get here?”

“Yesterday. Dad dumped me and took off back to the East Coast.”

Kayla lifted her duffel again. “It’s not a bad place to get dumped.”

A predictable response, based on the information in the girl’s background file.

The seventeen-year-old junior from the impoverished north side of St. Louis was here on one of the few grants offered to promising students from lower-income families, established at the urging of Reverend Tyrone Wilson, a longtime member of the school’s board of trustees and the prominent pastor of a church on the north side.

Thanks to her strong standardized test scores—and Reverend Wilson’s recommendation—Kayla had been offered the opportunity to profit from the excellent education Ivy Hill offered. An opportunity her parents had encouraged her to pursue.

But while her record here was impeccable and her grades high, she wasn’t a joiner. Her name was nowhere to be found in the school’s roster of clubs or sports teams.