"Adeline—can I visit?" the subject line read, and Noah stopped typing mid-sentence. He left his fingers hovering over the keyboard and stared at the sender name as if an old friend had materialized in his living room. The apartment lights were low; the monitors cast a square of blue on his face. He blinked once and then opened the message. "Noah, it's me. I graduated. Can I visit? —A." He clicked the message and scrolled. The email was short, the handwriting digital and the punctuation tidy, exactly as it had been in a chain of notes that started ten years ago when two kids sent long paragraphs about books and bad pop songs. "Ten years," he said aloud. The sound of his own voice surprised him. He sat back. His coffee had gone cold on the desk. Papers waited like small, polite alarms. Contracts. Calendars. A press kit with Freja Compton's latest staged smile on top. He should have closed the laptop and kept working. He didn't. "Noah, are you going to reply or are you going to archive a decade?" Elliot's text popped up on his phone, timed like a prank. Elliot always timed his observations. "No reply yet," Noah typed back. "Reading." "That's suspicious," Elliot sent. "Is she bringing baked goods or drama?" Noah smiled without planning to. He remembered a dog-eared paperback with a coffee stain on the corner and a scrawled note inside: Meet me at the library