The cafeteria was the same one I remembered, mostly.

Same brutalist concrete ceiling, same plastic trays stacked in the same crooked column, same hand-lettered sign above the soup station that had been "soup of the day: ask" for the entire four years I’d been a student.

Whoever ran the sign had simply given up at some point and let the universe handle the rest.

Yuna led me through the side entrance like she had done it a thousand times, which she probably had, and waved off the cashier with a small smile that said put it on my faculty tab, I’ll handle the rest of it.

I trailed her with my tray, attempting to look like a man who belonged here, which I did not, because the last time I had been in this cafeteria I had been twenty-two and had weighed about thirty pounds less and had been wearing the same hoodie for three days running.

’Hermit boy returns to the scene of his original hermitage. Different shoulders. Different car parked outside. Same soup-of-the-day sign. Filed for the novel.’

A small clatter of trays at a long table to our left made me glance over.

Three girls, undergrad-looking, had stopped eating to stare. Not at me, I noticed, which I appreciated. They were staring at Yuna.

One of them leaned to another and whispered something behind her hand, and the friend’s eyes went wide.

"...Is that Professor Sakamoto?"

"That’s her, that’s definitely her—"

"Wait. Wait. Is she smiling?"

"Who’s the guy?"

"I don’t know but she’s smiling at him—"

Yuna, walking ahead of me, did not so much as twitch. She had heard them and was making a point of not turning around, which was its own small power move.

I caught up to her at a small two-top by the window. She set her tray down, unwound the strap of her bag from her shoulder, and finally, only when she was seated, did she look over her glasses at me with a slightly tired amusement.

"They think I am a statue, normally."

"I’m getting that impression, yeah." I sat across from her. "How bad is your reputation?"

"It is not a reputation. It is a teaching method." She picked up her sandwich, considered it, set it back down. "I am a strict grader and I do not give second chances on the first midterm. After that, I am very generous. But the first midterm establishes the relationship. They never get past the first midterm. So they assume I am, you know, permanently like that."

"Permanently like what?"

"Like a woman who does not laugh."

"...And here you are."

She gave me a wry look over the rim of her glasses. "Here I am. Eating a sandwich with a former student who walked off after saving me from a man with a knife and then turned up later having apparently been replaced with a different, larger person. The girls are going to talk."

I looked down, "Sorry."

"Don’t be," she paused, the corner of her mouth lifting. "It is, frankly, the best thing that has happened to my campus reputation in a year."

I snorted and unwrapped my sandwich.

A professor in a navy cardigan walked past our table holding a coffee. He glanced at Yuna, gave her the polite faculty nod, glanced at me, and his eyes slid right over me like I was a piece of furniture. No flicker of recognition. Nothing.

’Two years out and Professor Halverson does not know my face. To be fair, he was the one who told me I wrote like a man trying to apologize for taking up oxygen, so the feeling is mutual.’

I bit into my sandwich. Genuinely decent. Yuna had not lied about the place across the green being good, but she had also undersold the cafeteria, which had a perfectly serviceable chicken-and-something on what was either rosemary bread or just very assertive regular bread.

"How is the writing?" Yuna asked, breaking the small silence. "You were the one student who actually finished his free-response section on the final by writing a small fable. I gave you a B for it, but I have thought about that fable maybe four times since."

"Only four?"

"Five, counting now."

"...I’ll take it." I leaned back. "Writing’s good. Better than it’s been in a while, actually."

"Mm." She wiped her fingers on a napkin, very precise. "I read one of your webnovels."

I froze with the sandwich halfway to my mouth. "You did?"

She smiled, "I am a curious woman. I went looking."

I sighed, "...Professor."

"Yuna."

"...Yuna. That was a federal violation of student-teacher privacy." I said. "I just gave it as a joke."

She laughed, the same laugh from the alley, but a little fuller this time. "It was on a public website. You posted it for strangers to read. I am a stranger. I read it."

I rolled my eyes, "You are a former economics professor, not a stranger. There is a difference."

"Mm. Fine, I am an informed stranger." She took a small sip of her water. "It was the progression fantasy, the cultivation one, with the boy who finds the mountain."

I groaned and put my sandwich down. "Oh god."

"It was fine, Lukas."

"Damnation. ’Fine’ is what you say to a child who has drawn a slightly lopsided house."

She chuckled softly and said, "It was more than fine. It was decent. The pacing in the first arc was very competent. The voice was, hm, the voice was the strongest part. I felt I knew the protagonist by the third Chapter, which is not nothing. But—"

"There it is." I sighed in exasperation. What else did I expect from a professor like her?

"—a few things were strange." She set her glass down and looked at me over her glasses, fully in professor-mode now, and I realized with a small internal lurch that this was the same exact face she made when she was about to gently destroy a student in office hours.

"The economic system in the second arc made no sense. The kingdom had a gold-backed currency and also somehow had a thriving credit market, which, as someone who teaches macroeconomics, I have to say is, mm, very ambitious of you. Also, the love interest in Chapter seventeen had brown hair in one paragraph and black hair two paragraphs later. Also, you used the word ’verily’ three times in one Chapter and I think you were being serious about it."

I covered my face with one hand. "Yuna."

"It is, overall, decent." She was smiling now, openly, enjoying herself. "But it is not a published-author-level novel. It is a promising novel. There is a difference."

"...Yeah."

"You are not insulted." She noticed.

"No, I’m not insulted." I dropped my hand. "You’re right. That was a learning project. I knew it was a learning project when I wrote it. The economics in arc two is genuinely embarrassing, I went back and reread it last month and almost deleted my account."

"Don’t delete your account."

"I won’t."

She heaved a sigh of relief and said, "I read the whole thing, Lukas. I read four hundred Chapters. Do not delete the account on me."

I stared at her, my eyes almost popping out.

"...You read four hundred Chapters."