Both of them froze.

The voice came from directly behind them, and it was unmistakably Professor Vance's voice, delivered in the particular register she used when she was not shouting because shouting was unnecessary given the situation.

They turned.

Professor Vance was standing approximately three feet away. Hands folded over her very substantial belly. Reading glasses dangling from her fingers. She looked from Felicity to Audrey, and then, with the expression of a woman who had genuinely had enough of this particular Wednesday, she said:

"My office, Miss Lorne. After your next class."

She turned and walked away without waiting for a response.

Audrey stared straight ahead. Felicity stood beside her, also staring straight ahead, and had the sense, for once in her life, not to say anything at all.

Sebastian Crowe woke at 6:04 a.m. and spent four seconds trying to hold onto her face before it disappeared completely.

She had been sitting across a kitchen table from him. Morning light. A coffee cup in her hands, both hands wrapped around it, the way people hold coffee when they need the warmth and not just the caffeine. She'd been watching him with this particular expression - quiet, knowing, a little careful - and then she'd pushed the cup across the table toward him.

I remembered how you take it, she'd said. Not proud of herself. Just - matter-of-fact. Like knowing his habits was simply something she'd absorbed.

He'd looked at her. She'd looked back. And then she'd asked, very softly: Do you like it?

And it hadn't been about the coffee.

He'd known exactly what she meant. He'd been about to answer. And then the alarm went off and she was gone and the whole thing evaporated - not slowly, not the way normal dreams fade, but immediately, completely, like someone pulling a plug. The table, the light, the cup. Gone. All of it gone.

Her face, most of all, gone.

Sebastian sat up. He pressed both hands flat on his thighs and made himself breathe normally, which was harder than it should have been for a man who ran high-stakes negotiations for a living. He looked around his bedroom - familiar, ordered, everything in its place, the pale grey light of an early November morning coming through the curtains - and felt the particular, grinding frustration of someone who has lost something for the hundred and first time.

He was thirty-four years old. He ran Crowe Group, which employed eleven thousand people across four countries and operated in eight verticals, and he had managed it since he was twenty-two with a combination of strategy and a documented eidetic memory that had, on at least one occasion, been weaponized in an arbitration hearing to genuinely devastating effect. He could recall, word for word, the exact terms of contracts he'd reviewed three years ago. He remembered the names and faces of everyone who had ever walked into a room with him. He remembered color-coded spreadsheets, financial projections, the precise wording of every negotiation he'd ever been in, the breakfast order of a business partner he'd met twice in Singapore in 2019.

He could not remember the face of the woman he'd been dreaming about for ten years.

She had appeared first when he was twenty-four. One dream, unremarkable - she'd been reading in a window seat somewhere, her back partly turned, and he'd had the odd, certain feeling that she was someone he already knew. He'd thought nothing of it. The following week, she was back. The week after. Then twice a month, then weekly, and at some point in the past few years, it had stopped being a recurring dream and simply become a permanent fixture - she was just there, every time, the same woman, different dreams, always unmistakably her even though he could never hold onto the specifics of her face when he woke.

He had told a therapist about it, once, three years ago. Dr. Hartley had said something about the anima archetype and given him a reading list. Sebastian hadn't gone back.

The maddening part - the part he couldn't talk himself past - was that it was never vague. In the dream, she was completely specific. A real person, not a concept. He knew the sound of her laugh. He knew the way she tilted her head slightly to the left when she was thinking. He knew she took tea in the mornings and coffee in the afternoons, which was backwards from most people, and he knew she always kicked off her left shoe before her right when she sat down somewhere comfortable. These details accumulated in his dreams over ten years and he retained all of them with perfect clarity.

Only the face. Only that one thing.

Next time, he told himself, standing and reaching for his phone. Next time you'll hold onto it.

He'd said that before. A hundred times, a hundred different mornings. He put the phone in his pocket and went to make coffee.

"Your nine o'clock is confirmed," Oliver said, appearing the moment Sebastian stepped off the elevator. "Merritt and Associates in the east conference room. Ten-thirty is Singapore - I have the line ready in your office. Twelve-thirty is the working lunch in the boardroom, I moved it from the private dining room because-"

"The Marsh dinner tonight," Sebastian said. "Cancel it."

Oliver's step stayed steady, but his pen paused over his tablet. "The Whitney Marsh dinner. Your uncle-"

"Cancel it."

"He specifically requested-"

"Oliver."

"Canceling it." A brief pause while he typed. "I'll cite a scheduling conflict."

"You don't need to cite anything."

"Right." Oliver cleared his throat. "Your uncle also called twice this morning before eight. I told him you were in transit."

Sebastian looked at him briefly.

"He sounded very well," Oliver offered. "Hawaii weather has apparently been exceptional."