Quinn Carter absorbed the surrounding chorus of condemnation with visible satisfaction, like a conductor listening to his orchestra hit every note.

"Nauseating," he declared, loud enough for the final row of tables to hear. "Absolutely nauseating."

Stan looked around the cafeteria, at the hostile faces, the shaking heads, the phones being pulled out to text friends who weren’t present, and felt a familiar, weary amusement settle over him.

These people had taken a thirty-second interaction, stripped it of all context, filled the gaps with pure imagination, and arrived at a version of events in which Stan Harrison was a predatory monster holding a beautiful girl hostage with financial leverage. They hadn’t asked Sarah. They hadn’t asked him. They’d listened to Quinn Carter, Quinn Carter, a man whose primary qualification was losing a love triangle to a guy who’d also lost, and decided that was sufficient evidence to convict.

The gap between what these people believed and what was actually true had now widened into something genuinely comical. In their version, Stan was a broke bully exploiting a vulnerable girl. In reality, he had paid off her family’s thirty-million-dollar debt without asking for a single dollar back, was quietly terrified that she might try to repay him, and had turned down her dinner invitation because his schedule was packed with the demands of managing a nine-figure fortune.

He picked up his utensils, took another bite of fried chicken, and decided, for the second time that lunch, that the explanation wasn’t worth the effort.

Let them build their little story. Let Quinn have his moment.

None of it mattered. None of it changed the numbers on his bank statement, the deeds in Sophie’s hands, or the favorability counters ticking quietly upward in the background of his life.

Stan chewed, swallowed, and reached for his fries.

’Idiots. Every last one of them.’

....

Meanwhile, two figures were making their way across the courtyard toward the cafeteria entrance.

"Is he in there?" Sophie asked, her voice quiet enough that only the girl beside her could hear.

"Definitely. I watched him walk in with his friend about fifteen minutes ago," Claire Reid confirmed, matching Sophie’s pace with the practiced efficiency of a best friend who had been drafted into reconnaissance duty.

Sophie nodded once and kept walking.

She’d come to find Stan Harrison for one reason: the gift. An entire building in Four Seasons Garden, fifty-plus property deeds delivered in a plain manila envelope, without a note, without fanfare, without even staying to watch her reaction. The sheer scale of the gesture was still settling in her mind like sediment in still water. She couldn’t let something like that go unacknowledged. Not thanking him in person would be worse than rude, it would be cowardly.

The moment she stepped through the cafeteria doors, the room changed.

It was subtle at first, a slight drop in volume, a ripple of turned heads, and then not subtle at all. Conversations cut off mid-sentence. Trays paused mid-air. A boy near the entrance actually choked on his drink.

"Sophie Youngs,"

"Sophie Youngs is here," 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

A small crowd began coalescing around her almost immediately, the way iron filings gather around a magnet. Boys materialized from adjacent tables, from the lunch line, from corners of the cafeteria that shouldn’t have had a sightline to the entrance but somehow did.

Sophie moved through them without stopping, her expression polite but closed, her trajectory unwavering.

Quinn Carter, still standing beside Stan’s table basking in the moral authority of his recent performance, spotted her and lit up like a child on Christmas morning.

"What is happening today? Both campus beauties in the same cafeteria?" He turned to the nearest person with theatrical disbelief. "What kind of luck is this?"

Then he noticed the direction Sophie was walking.

Toward him.

No, not toward him. But past him. Through him. In the direction of...

Quinn’s grin began to curdle.

’No. Absolutely not. There is no possible way.’

He knew his own limitations. He was under no delusions about his standing in the campus hierarchy. Sophie Youngs approaching Quinn Carter voluntarily was about as likely as lightning striking the same cafeteria tray twice.

His eyes slid sideways to the man sitting calmly beside him, eating his fried chicken and fries with the untroubled composure of someone who had absolutely no idea that a nuclear event was about to occur.

’Stan Harrison?’

’That’s impossible. She rejected him yesterday. Her own brother threw him out. There is no way,’

Sophie stopped directly in front of Stan’s table.

"What a coincidence."

Her voice was soft and warm, and the smile that accompanied it was the kind that rearranged the internal chemistry of every man within visual range. A slight bow of her head, graceful, almost playful, accompanied the greeting.

The cafeteria, which had already been running at reduced volume, now dropped to near silence. A few hundred people collectively held their breath.

Even Stan was momentarily caught off guard.

He’d expected to see Sophie again eventually, the deeds guaranteed that much, but not here. Not now. Not walking into a packed cafeteria at lunchtime and smiling at him like they were old friends reuniting after a summer apart.

Her smile really was something.

The rumors about Peak University’s number one beauty were not, as it turned out, exaggerated. If anything, they undersold it. Up close, in motion, directed at him with genuine warmth behind it, Sophie Youngs’s smile was the kind of thing that made a man briefly forget his own name.

He caught himself staring half a second too long.

"Still looking?" Sophie tilted her head, the playfulness in her voice edged with something warmer. "Am I that pretty?"

"You have a beautiful smile," Stan said, recovering smoothly. He gestured to the seat across from him. "Sit down."

"Do you like it? My smile?"

"I do."

Sophie’s eyes held his for a beat. Then she lowered her voice into something softer, almost conspiratorial.

"Then I’ll smile at you every day from now on."

Stan’s pulse kicked up a notch despite himself.

’Easy. Steady.’