Chapter 1 The Arrival

• I arrived alone. No banners, no proud parents tugging at rolling suitcases. Just the hush of wheels against pavement, the soft screech as the cab braked in front of the archway, and the dull throb in my throat that I would not name. Not excitement. Not even fear. Something tighter, more familiar. Guilt.
• The campus looked exactly like it had in the brochure—ivy-choked stone, iron gates with Latin inscriptions no one could really translate, a clock tower that struck with the hollow gravity of time I wasn’t sure I deserved. I stepped out of the car like I was stepping into a memory I’d been punished for wanting.
• The driver asked if I needed help with my bags. I told him no. My voice was too high, too careful. He didn’t insist. I carried both suitcases myself, up two stone steps and through the gate that divided the town from the legacy I was trying to borrow.
• My dorm was tucked in the quieter end of campus—older, creakier, but with the view they saved for the scholars. “You’ll love it,” they’d said in the housing email. “You can see the chapel from your desk.”
• I didn’t pray.
• I found my room, turned the key like it might explode, and stepped into a yellowish cell with high ceilings and one long mirror I instinctively avoided. My roommate hadn’t arrived yet. I unpacked slowly, folding things like someone might grade the symmetry of my shirts. Everything I brought was neutral—soft sweaters, modest skirts, a single pair of heels I didn’t know how to walk in. It wasn’t modesty. It was armor.
• By the time I finished, it was dark outside. The chapel bell rang once. I stood by the window, watching the other students pass like shadows. Some of them laughed. I envied that—they already belonged. I’d spent years preparing to be one of them, but now that I was here, I felt like a counterfeit stitched together from library cards and silent dinners.
• I didn’t cry. I never did when it counted.
• The mentorship list went up two days later. I hadn’t planned to look. It was posted on the bulletin board by the philosophy wing, and I only happened to be passing by, telling myself I didn’t care. But I stopped. I read it.
• My name was there.
• Eleanor Sinclair – Professor Julian Voss.
• I read it again. The font blurred. My stomach curled in on itself. I wasn’t sure if it was pride or dread. Maybe both. The name meant something—I’d heard it whispered, sometimes with admiration, sometimes with something that sounded like fear.
• “He’s a genius, but…” I remembered one girl trailing off at a campus café.
• “But what?”
• “But intense. Like he sees through you.”
• I’d seen a photo of him once—grayish, black-and-white, taken ten years ago at a faculty lecture. He wasn’t smiling. His eyes were dark, sharply intelligent, the kind that didn’t look at you but through you, as if everything you were about to say was already filed, annotated, and quietly dismissed.
• I should have walked away. I should’ve requested a reassignment. But I didn’t. I told myself it was because I wanted the best. Because I earned it. But that wasn’t the truth.
• The truth was simpler, and uglier.
• I wanted to be seen.
• That night, I went to the library and found one of his books. A thick, leather-bound volume titled The Hunger of Knowing. I’d never heard of it, but it was listed in the archives, buried on the fourth floor behind a glass case. I had to ask the librarian to unlock it.
• When I sat down and opened it, the smell hit me first—old pages, ink, dust, time. It smelled like something forbidden. I turned to the first chapter. The first sentence was handwritten above the printed one, in blue ink that had faded at the edges:
• To understand the truth, you must first understand your hunger.
• I stared at it too long. I don’t even remember reading the rest. I just kept coming back to that line, like it was a doorway into something I wasn’t ready for but already needed.
• I closed the book. I checked it out under a fake reason. “Research,” I said. For a paper I hadn’t been assigned. The librarian didn’t ask questions.
• Back in my room, I lay awake while the radiator clinked and my heart thudded too loudly against my pillow. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, only that it wouldn’t let me sleep.
• I remembered my mother’s last words before I left: “Make us proud.”
• She hadn’t come with me to campus. She said she didn’t believe in emotional goodbyes. That they were a form of manipulation. She called herself strong, but I think she just didn’t want to see me leave. Or worse, succeed.
• We weren’t close.
• My father had died when I was thirteen. After that, it was just her and the houseplants she always forgot to water. I learned to disappear early. To feel things without showing them. To crave silence like it was safety.
• That first week, I spoke only when spoken to. I smiled when expected. I went to lectures, took notes in perfect lines, and told myself that if I did everything right, no one would notice how wrong I still felt.
• But then I kept thinking about that book. That line.
• To understand the truth, you must first understand your hunger.
• I didn’t know what kind of hunger he meant. Academic? Emotional? Something worse?
• I only knew that I felt it now. Like a slow burn at the base of my ribs. A pressure I’d spent years pretending wasn’t there. Now it was awake. And it had a name.
• Julian Voss.
• He didn’t know me yet. But I already felt like he’d written that sentence for me.
• And I couldn’t stop reading it.