The scrape of a chair snapped Solvian’s focus from the half-finished sketch in front of him. He almost never looked up during roll call—faces blurred into noise—but this one drew his eyes like a magnet. The new girl didn’t fidget like the others. She moved carefully, as if every gesture mattered.

He found himself watching the way her hand hovered above the page before she drew, the way her brow furrowed with quiet intensity. Something in that silence mirrored the ache he thought belonged to him alone.

By the end of class, Solvian wasn’t sketching his usual shadows anymore. He was tracing her outline in the margins, over and over, afraid to forget the exact angle of her shoulders, the curve of her wrist. A strange urgency gripped him—if he could capture her on paper, maybe he could keep her.