The town wrapped around the university like it had been there first — because it had. Appalachian State wasn’t prestigious. It wasn’t sleek. It was brick buildings softened by moss, narrow sidewalks cracked by tree roots, and mountains that rose like folded blue paper at the horizon. In autumn, the hills burned copper and gold. In winter, fog rolled low and stubborn, clinging to the river and the old railroad tracks that hadn’t carried coal in decades.

Lenore Dove had grown up thirty minutes down the highway in a trailer tucked behind her Uncle’s house. Everyone she loved worked two jobs. Everyone she loved carried something unspoken. She learned early how to stretch groceries, how to listen for the tremor in someone’s voice, how to make something beautiful out of very little. Music had been her inheritance.

Her uncles sang old ballads while hanging laundry, mountain hymns older than the state line. Lenore learned them by heart before she ever learned sheet music.

On Friday nights, she played at a dim, wood-paneled bar just off campus. Not because it paid much (it didn’t), but because the owner let her keep the tip jar and because the stage lights were warm and forgiving. She wore long skirts and thrifted sweaters, her dark curls pinned back loosely. When she sang, the room softened. Her voice wasn’t loud. It was steady.

Haymitch Abernathy had also grown up in that valley — just on the other side of the river.

Lower middle class meant the house stood straight and the lights stayed on. It also meant his mother worked overtime at the hospital and his father picked up every construction job he could find, rain or shine. Money was never absent. It was just never enough.

Haymitch had always been good with numbers. Good with mechanics. Good with anything that needed building. Engineering wasn’t a dream so much as a promise — stability, better pay, less physical wear than what his father’s hands showed after twenty years. He got into the university on merit scholarships and stubborn effort.

He waited tables at a diner three mornings a week. Worked campus maintenance in the afternoons. Took weekend shifts at a hardware store back home. Sent part of every paycheck to help with his younger brother’s braces and the rising electric bill. He wasn’t failing. He was exhausted. By the time Friday night came, his shoulders carried the week like a physical weight.

The night they met, Haymitch had come straight from a double shift — grease still faintly clinging to his sleeves, textbooks in his backpack. His friend Burdock had dragged him to the bar for “one beer, that’s it.”

The bar was loud when he stumbled in, baseball cap pulled low, eyes ringed with exhaustion. He didn’t notice the stage at first. Didn’t notice the girl with the old Martin guitar and the mic stand wrapped in string lights. He ordered a drink. Sat at the counter. And somewhere between the second verse of one of the covey songs Lenore Dove was singing, his head tipped forward.

He fell asleep. Not dramatically. Not collapsed. Just, gone. Like someone had unplugged him.

Lenore noticed because he was directly in her line of sight. She kept singing. But she was annoyed.

It wasn’t just that he was sleeping. It was that he looked young. College-young. And something about that, about someone her age looking that tired, pricked at her.

After her set, she packed up carefully. When she stepped down from the stage, and nudged Haymitch awake.

“Hey, buddy. You’re snoring.”

He jerked upright, disoriented, eyes sharp and defensive before they settled. They landed on her.

She raised an eyebrow. “Good nap?”