Page 35 of Lethal in Pink

“See you Thursday, hotshot,” I say.

She shoots me a look of disdain, but she also doesn’t correct me.

Progress.

She just turns, adjusts her bag on her shoulder, and walks toward the stairwell, her ballet flats making almost no sound against the old hardwood, and I stand there in the alcove with the warm lamp and the empty coffee cup and the distinct, unsettling sensation that something has shifted—something small, something quiet, something I am absolutely not going to examine too closely because examining it would require admitting that I care, and caring is complicated, and complicated is the one thing I came here to escape.

Chapter twelve

Amiyah

Monday morning hits different when you walk into a lecture hall and find a pink rose sitting on your seat like it owns the place.

I stop in the doorway. Students push past me on both sides, backpacks swinging, sneakers squeaking against the tile. I let them. My eyes are fixed on the flower.

A single pink rose. Placed in the center of my chair with a precision that suggests intention rather than accident.

I pick it up, hold it at arm’s length the way you might hold a venomous snake—with respect, curiosity, and a healthy dose of suspicion.

The stem has been trimmed at a precise angle, the cut clean and deliberate. No thorns remain. Each petal is perfectly formed, the color a deep blush that fades to almost white at the edges.

My gaze sweeps the lecture hall in a practiced arc—door to window, front row to back row, seat by seat, face by face.

Professional habit.

I clock Jae’s face almost instantly.

He’s sitting in the very back row. Last seat on the far left, tucked against the wall like he’s trying to become part of the architecture.

This is better, actually.

He's back there, I'm up here, there's twenty feet of breathing room between us and that is objectively an improvement. I hope he stays there. I hope he loves it back there. I hope he makes a little home in the last row and never moves again.

I sit down, and set the rose on the desk. Opening my binder, I align it with the edge of the surface, and place my pen case to the right with the focus of a woman who is completely, totally, one hundred percent unbothered.

The rose sits there.

Pink.

Fragrant.

Smug.

Professor Chen walks in at 8:02 and greets the class. There is a collective mumble of “good morning” from the class before he begins.

The lecture starts and he begins flipping through slides.

I write it all down. Pink for key concepts, yellow for case citations, blue for Chen's asides. My notes build neatly on the page. United States v. Roberts, 848 F.2d 906. Chain of custody protocols. Documentation requirements. The dry bureaucratic architecture of making sure evidence stays evidence.

The rose sits at the edge of my desk and smells faintly expensive.

I do not look at it because I am taking notes. I am a serious law student with a 4.0 GPA and a color-coded organizational system and absolutely no feelings about flowers left anonymously on chairs by men who have relocated themselves to the back row, pretending they’re invisible when they are, in fact, the single most visible person in the room.

By the time Chen gets to the last slide, I have two and a half pages of notes and zero thoughts about roses.

Well, almost zero.

Class dismisses, and I close my binder with a soft, final sound and sit for exactly three seconds while the room empties around me. Then I pick up the rose, stand, and walk to the back row.