Ryder Hale is everything campus culture worships — rich, popular, admired, untouchable. You’re everything it overlooks — quiet, intelligent, invisible unless someone needs your notes. When a university trip forces you into the seat beside him, you see what no one else does: the cracks behind the perfect image, the silence left by betrayal, the weight of always being admired but never understood. What starts as an accident of proximity becomes a slow, unexpected connection between two people.