He had not approached. Had not acknowledged me. Had seen me, had whatever he'd had on his face for less than a second, and had continued walking.
I looked at my lunch.
Picked up my fork.
"Who was that?" Cleo said.
I looked up. She was facing the direction Dominic had gone, her textbook closed now, the rosemary thing set aside.
"Someone I know," I said.
"From where."
"I'm staying at his house."
A pause. She turned from the corner of Moreau Hall back to me, and I watched her run that sentence through whatever interpretive framework she applied to new information, which appeared to be thorough and unhurried.
"Voluntarily?" she asked.
I considered the question. "Complicated," I said.
She nodded, in the specific way of someone holding an answer they intended to return to when invited and not before. I had noted this quality in her, the ability to receive incomplete information without pushing at the edges of it, to treat the incompleteness as a structural feature of the situation rather than an oversight to be corrected.
"He's the one who arranged your transfer," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"And the Moreau Hall situation."
"Probably."
She picked up her rosemary thing. Took a bite. Looked in the direction he'd gone with an expression that was thoughtful in the way of someone running a quiet analysis.
"He stopped," she said.
"I noticed."
"Not like he saw you and was deciding whether to come over." She tilted her head slightly. "Like he saw you and it did something and he needed a second before he could keep walking."
I looked at my notes from the morning, which I'd set on the bench beside me. The clean handwriting, the economic theory, the four pages of normal intellectual life.
"He had somewhere to be," I said.
"Sure." Cleo's tone was the tone of someone agreeing with a true statement while declining to agree with its implication. She took another bite. "He just also had a face for a second."
I said nothing.
She let it sit for a moment, that comfortable quality of silence she had, which didn't require filling and didn't accumulate pressure. Then she looked at me with the frank directness I'd come to understand was her default register, the one she used when she'd decided something was worth saying plainly.
"He looks at you," she said, "like you're the only problem he doesn't know how to solve."
I picked up my fork again. Put it down.
"You've seen him for thirty seconds," I said. "From fifty feet away."
"I'm a musician." She closed the urban theory textbook with the finality of someone done with it for the day. "I spend a lot of time watching people make faces they don't know they're making." A pause. "It's a very specific look. I've seen it before. Usually it takes people a while to figure out what to do with it."
I looked at the corner of Moreau Hall, where the brick was warm-colored in the November afternoon, where he had been and was no longer.