Mia Cole's best day turned into her worst in five minutes flat.
She got into her dream university. Then she caught her boyfriend, Jake, in bed with another girl.
Heartbroken and furious, Mia did something wild. She walked into a bar, locked eyes with the most dangerously handsome man she had ever seen, and let one electric night erase all her pain.
She never got his name. She never planned to see him again.
But when Mia walks into her very first college class, her heart stops cold. Standing at the front of the room, in a sharp suit with those same dark, unforgettable eyes, is him, Professor Ethan Cross. Her new literature professor. The man she slept with the night before.
Now they are stuck in the same room, three days a week, pretending that night never happened. But the more Ethan tries to push her away, the harder Mia falls. And the more Mia grows into her own power, the harder Ethan fights to keep his walls up.
One wrong move and they both lose everything. But the heart does not care about rules.

I know the exact time because I look at the clock when the door clicks shut, the way you look at a clock when you've been waiting for something to be over. The room empties the way rooms do after class scraping chairs, zipped bags, a low tide of conversation pulling everyone toward the door and then it's just me and thirty empty seats and the whiteboard with today's discussion question still on it.


What does it cost a person to want something they cannot have?


I wrote that at 8 AM this morning. I have been teaching this material for four years. I chose that question specifically, intentionally, for its academic relevance to the Ishiguro text.


Chapter 16 - "The Honest Conversation"