The next morning, sunlight pushed through the dormitory blinds in long, warm strips across the floor.
The four of them dragged themselves awake — some by internal clock, some by the dull throb of a mild hangover — and shuffled to the dining hall after a quick wash to refuel before the day started.
The place was already packed. The smell of fresh coffee, bacon, scrambled eggs, and toasted bagels hit them the moment they walked through the door — the full sensory assault of a college cafeteria on a weekday morning.
Ethan grabbed a bowl of halal cart-style chicken and rice from the hot food station — the dining hall's surprisingly solid attempt at it. Marcus loaded up a tray with a mountain of scrambled eggs, sausage links, and a side of hash browns, looking deeply satisfied with himself. Derek went simple: a sesame bagel with cream cheese and an orange juice. Kevin drifted past all the hot food, inspected two or three stations with quiet disdain, and eventually settled on an avocado toast and an iced latte from the café window.
They ate fast, said little, and headed out.
After breakfast, the four of them followed the flow of freshmen toward Stern Hall — home of NYU's business program — and found their way to the classroom assigned to Business Administration, Section 2.
The hallways were buzzing. Everyone had that same wide-eyed, slightly overwhelmed energy of a first day: lanyards still stiff and new, schedules pulled up on phones, conversations starting mid-stride with total strangers.
When they pushed open the classroom door, a good chunk of the seats were already taken.
Most people were talking in pairs or small clusters, but every time the door opened, heads turned — the quiet, instinctive curiosity of people sizing up the classmates they'd be stuck with for the next four years.
Ethan walked in with the others and felt the shift in attention without needing to look for it.
He was used to it, vaguely. Tall, with the kind of face that read as effortlessly put-together even at eight in the morning. A few girls near the front were already murmuring to each other.
But his footsteps slowed almost imperceptibly just past the doorway.
That vague feeling from the night before — that quiet sense that something was slightly off about how the pieces were falling into place — crystalized the moment he scanned the room.
There it is.
His eyes moved quickly across the rows of unfamiliar faces. Most of them he didn't know, which was normal, expected. But tucked inside all that unfamiliarity were two faces that absolutely should not have been here — and yet were.
The butterfly effect again.
First his three roommates, reassembled as if the universe had copy-pasted them straight from his last life. And now this.
"Ethan?" Marcus grabbed his arm. "Dude, you're just standing in the doorway. Let's go — back row, come on."
Ethan let himself get pulled forward, shook off the static in his head, and smoothed his expression back to neutral by the time they reached the last row of seats by the window.
The four of them dropped into a line, claiming the whole stretch.
Marcus leaned over almost immediately, voice low. "Yo, what was that? You looked like you saw a ghost back there."
Ethan exhaled slowly. Outside the window, the trees along the campus path were still thick and green in the late summer heat. "Nothing," he said. "Just zoned out for a second. Thought of something."
There was no version of the truth he could actually say out loud.
Marcus looked at him for half a beat longer than necessary, then shrugged and turned his attention to the girl two rows ahead of them, nudging Derek to look.
Ethan leaned back in his chair and let his gaze drift across the room — casual, unhurried — while his peripheral vision locked onto the two faces that had stopped him cold.
The first was a girl named Summer, a New York City native, born and raised in Queens.
She had a bright, easy smile and quick, perceptive eyes — the kind of person who made you feel like she was genuinely happy to be wherever she was. There was a warmth to her, but also a sharpness underneath it. Funny when she wanted to be. Calculated when she needed to be.
In his previous life, Ethan had known her as his class rep — the one he'd spent half his sophomore year coordinating with on department events and student government logistics. She'd been exactly as capable as she looked: in the student association executive board by sophomore year, on the dean's honor list, recruited straight into a competitive government policy track after graduation. One of those rare people who seemed to have their entire life mapped out at eighteen and somehow actually followed through on it.
The second was a girl named Nora.
The first time Ethan had come across that name in his past life, something about it had caught him off guard — there was something quietly poetic about it, delicate and old-fashioned in a way that didn't quite fit the world around it.
Then he'd actually met her, and the whiplash had nearly knocked him sideways.
Because Nora Wren, when he first encountered her, was wearing the most aggressively unassuming outfit he'd ever seen on a college student. Oversized hoodie, two sizes too big. Baggy cargo pants. Hair hanging in a heavy curtain of dark bangs across most of her face. Thick, slightly clunky black-framed glasses. A KN95 mask that covered everything from the nose down. The overall effect was somewhere between "library ghost" and "person actively trying to disappear."
It had continued like that for two years.
Then, junior year, someone had accidentally pulled her hood down in the middle of a crowded hallway.
What followed became something of a campus legend.
Because beneath the hoodie and the bangs and the glasses and the mask, Nora Wren was — there was no diplomatic way to put it — absolutely stunning. The kind of face that made people stop mid-sentence. Sharp, clean features with a cool, almost cinematic quality to them. The kind of beauty that didn't need effort or context, that just existed at a different altitude from everything around it.
The loose clothes had been deliberate. The glasses, the bangs, the mask — a system, carefully constructed.
When the full picture finally came together, it had quietly rearranged the social landscape of the entire campus. Every previous "most attractive student" ranking became retroactive speculation. If the girl who'd been voted most beautiful that year was a 90, Nora Wren was a 98 — and that wasn't Ethan's assessment alone. It became the general consensus, practically overnight.
Ethan, who had been dating someone else at the time and thought himself well past being caught off guard by anything, remembered standing in that hallway and feeling something shift in his chest that took him a long time to explain away.
Right now, in this classroom, Nora was folded into the corner seat at the far end of the last row — right up against the wall — as if she were trying to compress herself into the smallest possible footprint. Head down. Bangs forward. Shoulders slightly inward.
The irony was that it didn't work. People kept glancing at her anyway, picking up on some instinctive signal they couldn't name — curiosity, a slight unease, the vague sense that something didn't quite add up. Whispers floated at the edge of audibility.
As it happened, the four of them had settled into exactly the same row.
Ethan's gaze rested on her for just a moment. Then, quietly, he leaned over to Derek and switched seats with him — sliding into the open spot directly beside Nora without making a thing of it.
Her reaction was immediate. Her whole body went rigid. Head dropped another inch. Fingers found the hem of her hoodie and twisted it slowly. The body language was unmistakable: why is someone sitting here, what do they want, how do I make this stop.
Behind him, Marcus and Derek traded a look.
"What is he doing?" Marcus breathed, barely audible.
Kevin, without a word, stood up and relocated to Ethan's original seat, putting an extra chair of distance between himself and whatever this was. The disdain was architectural.
Ethan turned slightly toward the girl beside him, kept his voice even and his posture relaxed — nothing pushy, nothing that required a response — and extended his hand.
"Hey. I'm Ethan Miller."
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