August in Vermont, room 214 in Hollister Hall, and Maya Chen is making a bed with hospital corners because that is how you prove you are paying attention.
In her back pocket is a letter she has read fourteen times. Dr. Julia Hart, director of the Briarwood Honors Scholars Program, offering her provisional admission, with her first semester to decide it. *We expect nothing less than excellence.*
Her mother made the checklist in her duffel. Step one: make the bed. Step two: arrange the desk. Maya follows it because following it is the only thing she knows how to do.
Two doors down there is a guy with a scar through his eyebrow and a guitar case with a peeling sticker on it: The Mourning Afters. Connor has not played a full set in front of anyone in two years, not since his brother Patrick's funeral. He keeps Patrick's yellow pick in his pocket, the one they found in his jacket after the accident.
Maya spills a drink down that guitar case in her first week. It is not a meet-cute. It is a stain spreading across the fabric and a boy going very quiet.
What follows is a semester of two people learning what the other one is carrying. Maya has a mother who texts *First impressions matter. Don't let her distract you* before the bags are even unpacked. Connor has a dead brother whose name he cannot say out loud. Priya, Maya's roommate, draws dinosaurs on her jeans and refuses to let Maya vanish into a library carrel.
And Sam Torres is a junior in the Honors program who wants the grad assistant spot, who sits down beside Maya in the front row, and who is in the library the night two months of her proposal work goes missing.
Then a band offers Connor a fill-in slot. Twelve cities, six weeks, an answer due in October.
*"I came to Briarwood to hide, Maya. I spent two years hiding. And then you left a note on my door, and I showed up to a study group I didn't need, and now I'm playing my brother's song in front of strangers and you're making me want to stay."*
Both of them have to decide whether the thing they built their whole identity on is worth what it costs. Dr. Hart, who is not the woman her office door suggests, made that choice herself once and has been living inside it ever since.
A new adult campus romance about grief, a stolen set of notes, an open mic and two people who stop performing long enough to be honest with each other. The romance is closed-door.
