The common room at this hour was usually empty.
Usually.
Ethan Von Sliverstel was sitting on the long couch with a book open across his knees and a cup of black tea on the side table, and he looked up when I came in and gave me the specific nod that said he'd registered my presence but wasn't requiring anything from it.
I sat down at the table on the other side of the room.
We'd shared space like this before — lectures, the dining hall, the restricted library on three separate occasions. We had never had a full conversation.
The closest we'd come was the hallway encounter in week six when he'd told me my Wind Step had a weight-distribution issue in the entry phase, unprompted, with the matter-of-fact quality of someone pointing out a problem they expected you to already know about. I'd thanked him.
He'd nodded and kept walking.
That was our entire relationship.
I opened my notebook to a blank page and wrote nothing.
