Prologue

The University of Washington library’s third floor was Ellie’s favorite—quiet enough that the undergrads rarely ventured up from the main study areas, populated mostly by grad students who respected the unspoken rules about keeping noise to whispers and keeping emotional breakdowns confined to the stairwells.

She was reshelfing returns in the literature section, her cart half-empty, when she heard the sound that every library employee dreaded: a laptop shutting down mid-work, followed by a very emphatic “Fuck.”

Ellie turned to find a tall guy in his late twenties staring at his now-black laptop screen with the specific expression of someone watching their entire plan disintegrate in real time. Wire-rimmed glasses. Dark wavy hair that looked like he’d been running his hands through it. A tech company hoodie—Amazon, she noted—and the kind of desperate panic that suggested this wasn’t just an inconvenience.

She approached carefully. “Everything okay?”

He looked up, and Ellie registered warm brown eyes behind those glasses, a mixed Latino complexion, and the bone structure of someone who’d been gangly in high school and grown into it. “My laptop just died. I have a presentation in—” he checked his watch, “—forty-five minutes and everything is on this machine.”

“Dead battery?”

“Yeah. And I’m an idiot who forgot his charger.” He pressed the power button again as if maybe the laptop would magically resurrect itself through sheer force of will. “I was running some resource-heavy programs earlier and didn’t realize how fast it was draining. I’m so fucked.”

Ellie set down her reshelfing cart. “What kind of laptop?”

“Dell. Why?” He looked confused about why that mattered.

“Because we have a back room full of chargers people have left behind over the years. Like, dozens of them. There’s probably something that’ll work.” She gestured for him to follow. “Come on.”

His expression shifted from panic to cautious hope. “Seriously?”

“Dead chargers and forgotten phone cables are basically our most common lost items. We keep everything for a year before donating.” Ellie led him toward the staff area behind the circulation desk. “I’m Ellie, by the way.”

“Jacob.” He followed her past the “Staff Only” sign, into a small room lined with shelves of abandoned items. “Please tell me you can find something that fits.”