Leah read it.

Then looked at the cafeteria photograph again.

“This is creepy.”

“That is not helpful.”

“It is objectively creepy.”

Jasmine closed the laptop.

She had no idea that a little more than seven months later, another photograph would exist.

Different camera.

Different cafeteria.

Different year.

Same family.

Same kind of stain across a white shirt.

And this time Jasmine would be the one standing in the middle.

Jefferson Ridge High sat twenty miles outside Richmond, Virginia, in a county that had transformed from farmland and small subdivisions into one of the wealthiest school districts in the region. The original brick school opened in 1927, additions arrived in almost every decade after, and the result looked as though six architects from different eras had been forced into a group project.

The oldest wing had narrow windows and terrazzo floors.

The science building was mostly glass.

The athletic complex looked newer than some colleges.

Nearly twenty-one hundred students attended Jefferson Ridge.

The student population was racially mixed, though wealth was distributed far less evenly than the glossy district brochures suggested. Some students arrived from gated neighborhoods where three-car garages were standard. Others lived in aging apartment complexes near the interstate.

Jasmine belonged somewhere in the middle.

Her mother, Renee Cole, supervised patient scheduling for an orthopedic clinic. Her father, Derrick Cole, owned a two-bay auto-repair shop with his brother.

They were not poor.

They were not rich.

They spent money carefully.

They argued about property taxes.

They drove vehicles until repairs became financially insulting.

Jasmine had attended Jefferson Ridge since ninth grade.

She was not a transfer student.

Not a scholarship student.

Not the daughter of anyone important to the district.

She was simply eighteen years old, Black, good at English and government, mediocre at chemistry, excellent at remembering conversations, and increasingly impatient with adults who believed teenagers could not tell when they were avoiding a question.

Her grandfather had attended Jefferson Ridge too.

That fact surprised her.

Family stories always placed Elijah in Richmond during high school.

Renee looked uncomfortable when Jasmine showed her the photograph that evening.

“You knew?”

“I knew he went there.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why would I?”

Jasmine stared.

“I go there.”

“So?”

“Mom.”

Renee closed the kitchen cabinet.

“Your grandfather did not talk about Jefferson Ridge.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You never asked?”

“When I was young, I knew he hated that school.”