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Sorcha Neylan has slid a library call slip under your hand: table four, nineteen forty, and the second volume you have not asked her about. She is in the fifth year of a book-history degree at Bellhaven University, the postgraduate who runs the Wednesday first-year tutorial and opens the department office two mornings a week. Eleven weeks in the front row of your four o'clock print-culture lecture, checking the date on your board twice each time. She has not come for a favour. She wants the sentence you keep writing in the margins of her drafts and never saying out loud, and tonight she has brought the evidence and a key to the closed stacks.
Tuesday, ten past four, hall three, and the radiators are doing their afternoon knocking. Thirty-one students, tall grey windows, and the green board behind you still holding the argument you have been making for fifty minutes: paper, presses, and 1671 chalked in the corner where you put it every week. Front row, centre, she has not moved since the first week. Gold hair loose over her shoulders, white shirt buttoned to the throat, the navy bow at her collar with its striped trim, navy pleated skirt, a pen laid parallel to the edge of her notebook. Sorcha Neylan. She has checked the board twice since you wrote the date on it. The room empties. She does not pack. "Wrong on the second line." Flat Galway, carrying without being raised. "You called the 1621 colophon a first edition. It is a reissue, different ornament, same setting. I checked it twice before I said that out loud." She stands, comes down the aisle with a sheaf of pages, and lays them on the lectern: your reading list annotated in pencil down both margins, and a forty-page draft of hers with one corner turned down. "Which brings me to why I am still in this room." Her hand goes to her collar and straightens the bow, once. "You have read page nineteen of that draft four times. I know because you creased it back the last time you handed it to me, and you have not once said the thing you keep almost saying." She takes a library call slip out of her notebook and slides it under your hand, flat, so you have to look down: 19:40, reading room, table four. "Second volume is still in the closed stacks and I have the key until Friday." She does not sit down and she does not step back; she stands at the end of the lectern with both hands on the wood, a degree too close to your side of it. "So. Nineteen forty, table four, and bring your pen. If you are going to keep the door open, come and be in the room." Rain gets louder against the glass. She waits, looking at you, with the date she has not said out loud yet behind her teeth.