Chapter Thirty-Eight Bram
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Bram
It’s the last week before finals, and it hits the department like an asteroid.
I find Dr. Mensah swaying on her feet in front of the vending machine, blinking hopelessly at a can of Diet Coke stuck in the chute, and Ali is in my office more than a Saint James cousin, anxious about this funding deadline or that professor taking family leave in the spring, and there is an unending parade of TAs with questions, problem cases, and mean emails from parents that they have no idea how to respond to.
And that doesn’t even touch the students themselves, some of whom are overly scrupulous about their grades and some of whom feel entitled to extra credit or eleventh-hour make-up labs to earn points they didn’t seem to give a shit about earlier in the semester.
With Sara thankfully back, though, it means I can pass the parenting baton (and Hester Prynne can go back to a life free of menacing frogs) and I can work as late as I need.
It means that when I leave Gerhart in the breath-puffing dark of December, the lights are out everywhere in Salih except in the stairwells, and I don’t have to wonder if Maddie’s looking out her window at a sleep-deprived dad in a peacoat and congratulating herself on making the right choice.
I don’t have to wonder if she saw the news about her ex-fiancé .
. . if she’s figured out it was me. And that’s fine, because I didn’t do it hoping that it would send her running back into my arms. I didn’t even do it because I hate hypocrisy—even though I do hate hypocrisy—or because I’d hoped something about the scandal would show Maddie that she deserved so much more than what that self-righteous clot of a man and men like him could give her.
No, I did it because he hurt her and he needed to burn for it. It was that simple. There is plenty in this world that I can’t fix, but this . . . this I could do. This I wanted to do.
And if I am alone at night, if I miss her snorts and sighs while she grades next to me, if I miss the way she looks in my old college shirts and the way she looks slipping off her heels after a bloodless victory, well, then I have no one to blame but myself.
I went and fell for her. I chose to plant my heart in the earth at her feet.
I can’t be upset when she tears it up at the roots.
It’s what you do with a weed, after all.
FRIDAY COMES, AND with it, a feeling like an inhale. Not quite relief, not yet, but the certainty that for better or for worse, everything will be over soon.
I’m checking over my test materials one more time before I close my laptop—just for Bio 1, Plant Ecology will have presentations instead—when I hear a knock on the door.
I look up to see Sloane in a red wool coat, her platinum hair gleaming with caught diamonds.
It must be misting outside, but when I look out the window, it’s too dark to tell.
“You have to follow me,” announces Sloane, in the kind of voice you use after someone in the room taps a champagne glass with a fork.
“Uh,” I say. “Follow you where? Because if Sara or Joey put you up to this, tell them I can relax at home alone with the frog, and I don’t need to be cajoled out to someplace noisy and hostile to contemplative thought.”
Sloane gives a look that says I’m too well-bred and gracious to say what I’m really thinking. “This has nothing to do with Sara or Joey—or Leo or Alessandro, for that matter. And it barely has anything to do with me. Now, get up, get up! Put those long legs to use!”
With a sigh, I push away from my desk, pack up my satchel, and stand up to get my coat.
“How was your week?” I ask as we leave the office and I flick off the light before closing the door. “I haven’t seen you much since . . .”
“Since my new tenant broke your heart?”
“Yes, that,” I say wryly.
“It’s fine, I guess.” Gerhart is mostly empty as Sloane leads me downstairs and out the front door. Dr. Monty, the primordial campus cat, trundles roundly across our path and then across the sidewalk-faceted lawn to the library.*
“Are you sure?” I ask. “I know you’re supposed to move out of Persimmon Hill soon.”
Sloane’s delicate exhale is nearly lost in the bitter wind dancing between the limestone buildings.
“The condo I’m supposed to buy, the one on the river, won’t be ready in time.
Some construction delay or another. So I’ll either need to move into a hotel or hope some poor student drops out of school midyear and frees up an apartment.
I don’t relish either option, honestly, but Lucien is .
. . firm . . . about my leaving Persimmon Hill in a timely manner. Which is his right.”
“He barely lived there when you were married,” I grumble, irritated on her behalf.
Lucien was gone, always, it seemed, for work or for work-adjacent things, for barely disguised affairs that never seemed to dent his obsession with Sloane for as often as they occurred.
Sloane was left to keep up appearances and semi-parent his teenage son, who had zero respect for his young stepmother and spent his last two years of high school making her life hell.
“It’s only to be a dick that he wants you out now. ”
“He’s angry I wanted out,” Sloane says with a sad sort of smile.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to work, you see.
I was supposed to stay the same tender, malleable ingenue who married him.
I wasn’t supposed to hate his affairs or have my own career or decide no amount of money or glamour was worth staying for. Here we are.”
I pause. We’ve come to Parker Hall, the oldest building on campus, symmetrical, stone, and forbidding.
Also half dark—it’s after five and the bursar’s office and counseling offices inside are shutting down for the weekend.
It’s a gorgeous building, possibly the heart of the university, but I step foot in here maybe once a semester.
I turn to Sloane. “Why?”
Sloane takes my arm and pulls me up the shallow stone steps to the door. “Because you have a class tonight.”
“I have a class tonight?” I’m completely baffled. And tired. And wishing I was at home nursing a beer and sketching something in my greenhouse, shading in the night shadows and capturing the feeling of growth in the dark.
“That’s what I just said. You don’t listen so well.”
She’s hustling me through the central atrium with its historic, coffered ceilings and down the hall, which is mostly dark.
“Just through there,” she says. “Last one on the left, with the lights on.”
“Wait—”
But she’s just pressing her chilled lips to my cheek and then walking away, her red coat the only bloom of color in the building.
I turn and look at the door she’d indicated—a massive wooden one with an old-fashioned transom window above it. Golden light glows from inside.
Utterly confused, I go to the classroom and open the door. And then freeze.
The classroom is one of the few classrooms left on campus that looks like a stereotypical college classroom—rows of wooden desks attached to seats, maps hanging from walls, a long wooden desk for the professor with a bust of Walt Whitman on it.
The chalkboards have been upgraded to dry erase boards, and the usual chandelier of technology hangs from the ceiling, but otherwise, this classroom is much the same as it was a hundred years ago.
And at the front, trailing a dark red fingernail over the edge of the desk, is Madelyn Kowalczk, wearing a black skirt with a slit up the thigh, a black, long-sleeved shirt with buttons marching up to her neck (not that it matters, the shirt is see-through, showing the flimsy camisole she’s wearing underneath), and a pair of dark green heels that should be illegal based on the ankle straps alone.
Her hair, still dark and flawlessly cut.
Her lips a brighter red than Sloane’s coat.