She wasn’t wrong.
I exhaled.
Then nodded once.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t move immediately.
Neither did she.
That was the problem lately.
Moments didn’t end cleanly anymore.
They just… paused.
Rowan looked at me once more.
“Text me later,” she said.
It wasn’t a question.
I nodded.
“Yeah.”
And this time when I walked away—
it didn’t feel like I was leaving something behind.
It felt like I was carrying it with me.
Forty Nine
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
ROWAN
I knew something was off the second I walked into the media lab.
It wasn’t loud.
It was worse than loud.
It wasfocused.
Everyone was hunched over laptops like their entire futures depended on correcting one sentence at a time.
Mia spotted me immediately. “You look like you didn’t sleep.”
“I did,” I lied.
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s not convincing.”
Professor Bennett clapped once at the front of the room.
“All right,” she said. “Final shortlist for New York internships will be posted in one week.”
