Because he didn't just know the flash drive existed.
He knew where I'd put it.
* * *
Chapter 5: Harlow
Harlow University had been built in 1887 by a man who wanted to ensure that the sons of New Orleans' best families received a proper education without having to leave New Orleans. The original endowment had been substantial. It had grown considerably since.
I read this on the car ride over in the welcome packet Henri had left outside my door that morning, along with a schedule, a campus map, and a coffee that was exactly the temperature and constitution of the one I'd poured for myself the day before. I noted the coffee. Moved on.
The packet also noted, in the formal language of institutional history, that Harlow had expanded its admissions to include women in 1962, had achieved full racial integration by 1968 after what the document described as a period of productive institutional reflection, and had accepted its first international students in 1975. What the packet did not note was that the Moreau family had contributed to every major capital campaign in the university's history and that three buildings on the main quad bore their name.
I counted those buildings when the car turned onto the main drive.
Three. Two were academic halls, one was the library. The library was the largest.
Of course it was.
I had been in New Orleans for thirty-six hours. I was beginning to understand that the Moreau name had a particularrelationship with space: it occupied it so thoroughly that eventually the space became indistinguishable from the name. I wondered, briefly, whether that was a strategy or simply what happened when a family had been somewhere long enough.
The driver left me at the main gate with my bag and a brief confirmation that he'd return at five unless I messaged otherwise. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment after the car pulled away, looking at the campus.
It was beautiful in the same key as the house, old money that had stopped performing and simply was, everything tended and considered and built to last. Oaks older than the institution itself lined the central walk. The buildings were a warm brick that had gone rose-colored with age, and the ironwork along the fences and the balconies of the older halls had the particular quality of things made by someone who thought decorative work was worth doing properly. Students moved between buildings in the drifting way of people who'd been here long enough to stop seeing it.
I started walking.
I had three classes today, according to the schedule: macroeconomic theory at nine, a seminar on contract law at eleven, and an afternoon lecture on urban development that my previous institution would accept as a distribution credit. My transfer had been pre-approved before I signed anything — the application submitted weeks earlier, records requested from my previous institution before I had agreed to a single term of this arrangement. My student ID had been in the welcome packet, already printed, already laminated. I thought about what that meant for a moment and then put it somewhere I wasn't looking.
He had already accounted for my agreement before I gave it. The application had existed before the choice had. Which meant the choice, in any meaningful sense, had been his.
Dominic Moreau apparently had opinions about loose ends.
I had learned that much from the yogurt.
He tracked small things. Once I understood that, I started tracking what he tracked. It was a more accurate map of the house — and of him — than anything he'd said directly.
Three things, in order: the yogurt, replaced before I registered it was gone. The bag, unpacked and repacked with attention to sequence. The transfer, approved weeks before the conversation that was supposed to decide it. I had filed them separately — service, logistics, a decision already made. But separate was a choice I’d been making, not a feature of what they actually were. The accurate word for what they had in common was method.
The macroeconomics lecture was in one of the named buildings, Moreau Hall, the smaller of the two academic ones, which I found without consulting the map because it was the one with the most visible signage. The room held perhaps sixty students. I took a seat toward the back, left side, near enough to the aisle to be useful if I needed to leave.
By the time the professor arrived, I knew that three people had looked at me for longer than the average glance warranted.
By the time the lecture ended, I knew that all three had their phones out during it, and that at least one of them had been looking at a screen rather than the slides.
I was in the hallway when I heard it for the first time, not the words exactly, but the shape of them, the pattern of a sentence that contained a name and a dropped voice. I didn't stop walking. I tracked the direction it came from, the two girls standing near the water fountain, the way they didn't fully disperse when I passed.
By the time I reached the building's exit, I understood that my name had arrived here before I had.
Not my name, exactly. My association. Dominic Moreau's fiancée. The phrase would travel differently than AveryCallahan, which was the name of nobody, a transfer student from out of state, economics major, no known connections. That person could have walked through Harlow for a semester before acquiring any social mass at all.
But Dominic Moreau's fiancée was not a person who arrived unknown.
I walked to the building where the contract law seminar was held, found a bench outside in the thin November sun, and sat with my notes from the morning lecture. Around me the campus moved through the gap between classes, a controlled tide, familiar enough to recognize and foreign enough to feel.
"You're on my bench."
I looked up.