He froze in the doorway. “Tatum?”

“No, you don’t. I never gave you one.”

He didn’t know she’d taken it from his car at 2:00 AM, using the spare key she’d had copied. It was now on her nightstand, next to the button. She’d memorized every doodle, every half-formed idea, every anguished little poem he’d scribbled in the margins. She felt closer to him than ever.

“I have a key.”

Tatum engineered a “chance” meeting at the campus art gallery, where a few of Elias’s architectural models were on display. She wore a sundress the exact shade of robin’s-egg blue she’d seen him compliment on a stranger. She positioned herself in front of his most fragile model—a cantilevered wooden bridge—and pretended to study it with intense scrutiny.

The second clue came three weeks later, when he mentioned he’d lost a favorite sketchbook. “It had some really personal stuff in it,” he said, frowning. “Weird. I swear I left it in my car.”

Tatum’s hand tightened around her mug. “That’s awful, baby. I hope you find it.”