Classes resumed. The hallways buzzed with the usual nonsense—exams, weekend plans, whispered gossip that never meant anything. Even the investigation seemed to fade into the background, reduced to murmurs and stolen glances at the detectives who still lurked around campus.
For everyone else, life returned to normal.
For me, it didn't.
I still woke up feeling like something heavy was pressing against my ribs. I still caught myself staring at the dorm ceiling for minutes, hours, trying to piece together thoughts that refused to settle. My body was here, my hands still took notes, my voice still answered when it needed to—but my mind was elsewhere.
Searching.
I wasn't stupid. I knew what I was doing. I knew how it looked. Obsession wasn't something that arrived all at once—it crept in. Slowly. Quietly. Until one day, you realized it had settled beneath your skin. Until it became you.
I spent my nights digging through every lead I could find. Old records. Student files. Fragments of conversations I barely remembered but felt important. I stayed up later than I should, eyes burning, fingers hovering over my keyboard long after the screen blurred.
And when my body finally gave up, I'd wake up with my cheek pressed against a desk, the room still dark, my window slightly open.
I didn't remember opening it.
But that wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was that he wasn't stopping me.
He wasn't trying to warn me.
He wasn't trying to threaten me.
He wasn't doing anything.
For a week, he hadn't spoken a single word to me.
Not in class. Not in passing. Not even in the moments where I swore I could feel his presence behind me, where I expected the sharp edge of his voice cutting through the silence.
Nothing.
It was like he'd erased himself from my world completely—except I knew he hadn't.
Because when I turned corners too fast, sometimes I thought I saw the edge of his coat disappearing down a different hallway.
Because sometimes, when I sat in the library, a book I didn't remember taking out would be placed in front of me—a title or subject matter eerily relevant to my search.
Because once, when I stayed out too late, pushing deeper into restricted records, someone was waiting outside the building when I left.
They didn't say anything. Didn't move.
But I didn't need to see his face to know.
He was still watching.
But he wouldn't interfere.
And for some reason, that scared me more.