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“It’s what it means.”

“Do people here know that?”

“Some.”

“Do they care?” I asked, needing to keep him talking.

“Why should they?”

I walked over and sat in the chair across from him, partly because I was tired and partly because I wanted to know how I hadn’t noticed him before and why his voice soothed something within me that I didn’t even know was anxious. “I suppose they don’t have to, but it seems like people should understand where they are.”

His eyes lifted then. Slowly. Fully. I had the uncomfortable sense of being attended to by something that did not waste attention often, and that when it spent attention it spent it all at once.

“People who inherit a place don’t usually ask what it was before it belonged to them. They take it and run with it as it is.”

Silence fell for a moment before I gave in and asked, “Who are you?”

“Linden Fenwick.”

He said it like it was the least important fact about him, and maybe it was. But the name meant something. I knew that because every name in this place meant something except mine, and because when he said Fenwick the room around him seemed to grow a second shadow. It was old and quiet, not like Mallory, which entered a room ahead of Vivienne in polished shoes, and not like Wyndham, which apparently came with fire and an audience. Fenwick felt like a name that had learned exactly where to stand so nobody noticed it.

“I’m Billie.”

“I know.” He blinked slowly, reminding me of a cat.

“Everyone does, apparently.”

“Not everyone writes things down.”

My fingers tightened on the notebook. His eyes went to the motion, then away, which I was grateful for as a blush crept into my cheeks.

I stood, not liking how easily it felt like he could read me. And he was reading me. As I gathered my books I noticed the one that he’d been guarding, the one I thought had no title, actually had a mark on the spine. A little inked code, letters and numbers in a scheme that matched nothing the catalogue had thrown at me all afternoon. Not academy, not old index, something else entirely.

“That one’s mine,” he said as though he could feel me looking at it.

“Sorry, wasn’t trying to pry,” I replied as I picked up the rest of my books.

He nodded once and I went about reshelving the books in my hands while keeping the code in my mind, intending to copy it down into my notebook later. Not because I knew what it meant, but because everything that did not fit here meant something.

When I finished reshelving and looked back, Linden Fenwick was gone. The titled books remained in neat stacks on the table, patient, waiting to be someone’s problem. The untitled one had vanished with him.

SEVEN

Billie

The last thing I expected at breakfast the next day was to find a note hiding under my plate of eggs. But there it was, the heavy cream card stock with the tree embossed on the front becoming visible as I slid it out from under the plate.

My stomach clenched around the eggs I’d just been eating and told me to stop chewing. Pippa saw the card before I could tuck it away.

“Oh,” she said.

I didn’t like the sound of that oh.

Kit was sitting two seats down with his boots hooked around the bench rung, like he’d always belonged at my table and not violently inserted himself there over the past week. He leaned over. “Secret admirer?”

I unfolded it.

Miss Lane,