Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kieran
The Principal sat opposite me, a folder open in front of her. The HR guy was there too, and another member of staff who sat with hands folded, their expression neutral.
I sat in a chair facing them. I hadn’t brought a Union rep with me.
I didn’t think I needed one.
I didn’t do anything.
Of course, if they’d reached a different conclusion, this was all going to go pear-shaped pretty fast.
I’d think about that if it happened.
Dr. Williams cleared her throat. “Kieran, thank you for coming in.”
I blinked. “I didn’t think I had a choice.”
My voice sounded detached, as if it belonged to someone else.
She stilled, then recovered enough to incline her head. “I appreciate this must have been a very trying time for you.”
Understatement of the millennium.
She glanced down at the folder. “However, we have now concluded our investigation.”
There it was, no build-up, no ceremony.
I waited, and she raised her head to look me in the eye.
“The allegation made against you has been found to be without merit.”
The words landed with precision.
I didn’t move, didn’t react, because for a second I wasn’t sure I’d heard them correctly, even though I knew I was innocent.
Then it hit me. I hadn’t expected them to work that out too.
“I see,” I said, my tone calm and measured, as though she’d just delivered a minor administrative update.
The Principal continued. “The student in question made a similar allegation against another member of staff.”
That caught my attention, and I frowned.
“There was no evidence to support either claim,” she went on. “However, during the course of the investigation, another student came forward.” She paused. “He stated that the allegations were fabricated. That the student—Oliver Roberts—had admitted as much to him.”
The name landed harder than anything else had, not because I didn’t expect it, but because hearing it made it real.
“This student initially hesitated to come forward,” she continued, her tone tightening. “But when a second member of staff was accused, he felt it necessary to speak.”
There was something like disapproval in her voice, but I knew instinctively that it was not directed at me, but at the situation.
I could understand that.
So if Ollie hadn’t accused another staff member, would this unknown student have kept silent? What was the deal here?
This wasn’t helping.
“And what will happen to Ollie?” I asked.
“He has been withdrawn from the college,” she said. “Effective immediately.”
Expelled, in other words. I suppose withdrawn sounded more pleasant than what it actually was.
“And the other professor?”
“Also cleared.”
Silence settled, and this had the feel of something final.
“You are, of course, reinstated,” she said. “With immediate effect.”
Of course.
The phrase struck me as oddly placed, as if this had always been the inevitable outcome. As if the past weeks had been—
What? An inconvenience? A necessary process?
I folded my hands loosely in front of me. “Thank you,” I said. The words felt insufficient, but I wasn’t sure what else there was to say.
The meeting ended shortly after, and it wasn’t until that point that I realised something.
There’d been no apology, just the quiet closing of a folder and a handshake.
It didn’t feel enough considering everything they’d put me through. In fact, it felt like a huge anticlimax.
I stepped outside into the corridor, lost in the noise of students moving between rooms. Nothing had changed. Life continued.
Except it had changed, for me.
Somewhere between the accusation and the conclusion of the investigation, something had shifted. I had my job back, my reputation, everything I’d thought I might lose, and yet it didn’t feel like a return.
It feels as though I’m starting all over again.
Because the new term had already begun, I was thrust back into it. No time to recalibrate, nothing but classes, timetables, students waiting for me to be exactly who I’d been before I left.
I hadn’t prepared anything in advance, of course. There hadn’t seemed much point at the time, not when I hadn’t even known if I’d be coming back. So I built everything on the fly. Lecture notes scribbled between emails, lesson plans adjusted ten minutes before walking into the room.
It should have felt chaotic. Instead, it felt… automatic, like muscle memory.
The first few weeks passed the way they always did.
Students filtered in and out of practice rooms, the sound of scales bleeding through the walls. Fragments of Chopin and Debussy collided in the corridors. Constant questions about interpretation, about structure, about whether they were getting it right.
I stood at the front of the lecture hall and talked about phrasing, intention, about how music wasn’t just played, it was shaped. They listened. They always listened, and I corrected them when they needed it, encouraged them when they faltered, and pushed them when they held back.
From the outside, nothing had changed.
I was still good at this. That hadn’t gone anywhere.
But somewhere in the middle of a student performance—halfway through a piece I knew intimately, one I could have taken apart bar by bar without thinking—I realised I hadn’t actually been listening, not properly.
I was watching his hands, waiting for something. And for a second, I didn’t even know what.
“Again,” I said, before he’d finished.
He blinked. “Sorry?”
“The phrasing in the second section,” I added quickly. “You’re rushing it.”
He nodded and started over, and this time I forced myself to focus, count, listen, engage… But the awareness lingered of that split second where I’d drifted.
Where I hadn’t been there.
It happened again later that week, and then again. Small moments, and it wasn’t just me who noticed.
And then there was the part I noticed next. Not all at once, but in fragments.
A conversation that stopped a fraction too quickly when I entered the room.
A student who avoided eye contact where they normally wouldn’t have.
A hesitation—brief, almost imperceptible—before someone asked a question, as if they were recalibrating something they hadn’t needed to before.
I told myself I was imagining it. Projecting. Looking for something that wasn’t there—until it happened again, and again, and again.
It was never overt. No one said anything. No one challenged me. No one treated me with anything less than surface-level respect.
But something had shifted, even it was subtle.
Then came the day when all was made clear, and it broke my heart.
“Can I ask you something?”
The student lingered after class, her tone careful in a way that immediately set me on edge.
“Of course.”
She hesitated before continuing. “Is everything… sorted now?”
I frowned. “Sorted?”
She flushed. “I mean—the investigation. There were… rumours.”
Of course there were. How did the saying go? No smoke without fire?
“It’s resolved,” I said, my tone even.
She nodded. “Right. Of course. I just—people were saying things, and I didn’t think—” She stopped herself.
Too late.
“It’s resolved,” I repeated, a little more firmly this time, my throat tight.
“Yes. Sorry.” She gave a small, awkward smile. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” I said.
And I did. That was the problem. She hadn’t meant anything by it, not really. She was just curious, repeating what she’d heard. Trying to make sense of it, like anyone would. She gathered her things and left, the door closing behind her.
I stood there for a moment longer, the empty room settling around me, my skin cold as ice.
There’d been no accusations or confrontation, only the quiet understanding that something had been said, somewhere, by someone—
And that it hadn’t entirely disappeared.
It lingered, not in facts but in perception. And no matter how confident I was in the truth, that didn’t mean everyone else would be.
I dragged a hand over my face before reaching for my notes. There was nothing I could do about it, not directly. It would take a while to challenge the rumours, and in the meantime I would teach, be consistent, and let time heal all things.
I’d done nothing wrong. I knew that. Karl knew that. Diana knew that.
And that would have to be enough.
But as I left the room and stepped back into the corridor, feeling the shift in atmosphere I couldn’t quite prove but couldn’t ignore either, I realised something else.
Even if everything here returned to normal, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to.
One afternoon, I stopped mid-sentence during a lecture, the words simply trailing off as something else caught hold of my attention, not something in the room but in my head. A memory. A different rhythm.
I recovered quickly. No one seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn’t comment.
But I noticed. That was the problem.
I started pausing more, letting students play longer than I normally would. Watching them instead of listening, my thoughts drifting—not randomly, not unfocused, but in a very specific direction.
Always the same one.
Berlin.
Those thoughts never arrived fully formed, but in pieces. A street, a sound, the way a room had felt.
And him.
It wasn’t overwhelming, but consistent enough that I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there.
Stefan.
I didn’t say his name out loud, not at first, but it was there all the same, sitting beneath everything else, threading through my thoughts in a way that made the rest of my life feel out of sync. Something I tried to ignore, and for a while, I managed it.
I didn’t check my phone constantly. Days would pass where I barely thought about it, where I moved through lectures, meetings, practice sessions with the same steady focus I’d always had.
But then there would be a pause. A gap. A moment where my hand hovered for a fraction too long before unlocking the screen.
Nothing.
No message.
No missed call.
No indication that anything I’d left behind in Berlin had followed me here.
I told myself that was exactly how it should be, that it made sense. Stefan wasn’t the kind of man who reached out without knowing why. He didn’t do uncertainty. He didn’t act unless he understood what it meant.
I knew that.
Which meant this radio silence wasn’t confusion. It was a decision, and that should have made it easier.
Because I’d made the same choice.
Hadn’t I?
I hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t asked. Hadn’t forced the moment. I’d left Berlin with that same restraint, that same understanding.
So this is the outcome of that. This is to be expected. It’s logical. It’s fair.
And for the most part, I believed that. I accepted it. Because anything else would have meant questioning something I didn’t actually doubt.
Stefan didn’t miss moments. He chose them.
And he hadn’t chosen me, not like that.
It didn’t undo what we’d had. It didn’t diminish it. If anything, it made it clearer, more defined.
Because now without the immediacy, without the intensity of being there, I could see it what it had been, what it hadn’t, what it could have been—and why it didn’t exist.
I picked up my pen again, forcing my attention back to the work in front of me.
This is my life. This is where I am.
And whatever had existed between me and Stefan, it belonged somewhere else.
Some place I wasn’t anymore.
Except even as I told myself that, my hand drifted, almost without thinking, to my phone again. I didn’t unlock it. I already knew what I’d find.
Nothing.
I let my hand rest there for a moment longer, then pulled it back, and got on with what was in front of me, the way I always did.
Only this time, it felt as though I was learning how to do it without him.