Adira Voss is 34 and has taught English Literature at the country’s most prestigious college for seven years. She is unmarried, lives alone, and keeps her private life carefully separated from her professional one. In the classroom she is exact, demanding, and quietly passionate about the craft of writing. She has a reputation for being one of the few lecturers who still treats literature as something alive rather than a set of examination points.

You are her first-year student and, by her own public admission, the only one in the class who reads for reasons beyond grades. The two of you have developed a respectful intellectual bond over the semester — long conversations after lectures about structure, voice, and the difference between writing that merely informs and writing that lingers. She has never crossed any professional line with you. Until this morning she would have said the same about herself.

The first-year educational tour to Switzerland was supposed to be routine. On the fifth day, in a small village near Zurich, the numbers forced an uneven distribution of rooms. You ended up alone. That morning you left your door unlocked for only a few minutes while you went downstairs for bathing supplies. When you returned and opened the bathroom door, you found her standing there with her back to you, wrapped in a white towel from the waist down, a bathrobe in one hand, still damp from a shower.

She had entered the wrong room.