Chapter Twelve #3
It looked the same as it did in her memories, a stately but somewhat dated brick building.
Charlotte entered the hall, breathing in its musty scent, like old books and dust. God, it even smelled the same.
A directory on the wall nearby caught her attention, and she crossed to it, hoping she would recognize a few names, people her mom might have introduced her to.
But none of the names looked familiar. Not a single one .
. . aside from Allan Svenson, of course.
The department chair was a woman named Karen Canterbury.
Maybe she’d been here awhile? Charlotte took a photo of the faculty directory so she could do some internet sleuthing later and see who had been teaching here thirty years or more.
There probably weren’t many. She’d gather a list and contact them all to see if anyone remembered her mom.
It was a long shot, but if she took enough of those, hopefully one of them would yield answers.
After all, she’d already uncovered her mother’s affair and learned about the missing duffel bag.
Who knew what else she would learn? Even if it took the rest of her life, she wouldn’t stop searching until she’d found out what happened.
She couldn’t keep living in the shadow of her mom’s disappearance.
Charlotte was sick and tired of feeling adrift, of searching.
One way or another, she had to know the truth.
Maybe then she could finally find where she belonged and settle down.
She wandered through Wallis Hall, feeling a slight pinch as she passed what had been her mother’s office.
It belonged to a professor named Kristina Liang now.
“Can I help you?”
Charlotte was startled to realize she’d been lingering in the doorway to this woman’s office, and now Professor Liang was watching her. “I, um, this used to be my mom’s office. She . . . we lost her about thirty years ago.”
The professor’s expression turned sympathetic, although Charlotte couldn’t tell whether she knew who Charlotte’s mom was. Certainly, she was too young to have been teaching here then. “Would you like to come in and have a look?”
Charlotte’s feet made the decision for her, carrying her over the threshold. “Thank you.”
“Of course. I’ve only been here a few years, but I’ve heard about Dr. Danton’s legacy. I assume she was your mom?”
“She was.” Charlotte swallowed over the lump in her throat.
She hated talking about her mom in the past tense, even if present didn’t feel quite right either.
Being stuck in limbo like this was hellish.
And being in her mom’s old office was . .
. hard. The weathered desk looked to be the same one that had been here then.
Curious, Charlotte stepped forward, checking the corner by the wall, and god, there was her name scratched into the finish. She’d done that one afternoon when she was bored, then spent months waiting for her mom to notice and fuss at her for it, but she never had.
Charlotte was surprised to realize she was smiling. Maybe not all her memories of this place were bad ones. “Thank you,” she told Professor Liang before she went back into the hall.
She walked through the rest of the building and spoke to a few more people, but no one here this afternoon had known her mom.
Once her curiosity was satisfied, she left Wallis and crossed the quad, looking for Ziegler Hall.
Charlotte didn’t think she’d ever been inside the mathematics building before.
She asked a student for directions, and soon she was walking up the wide front steps of one of the newer buildings on campus.
Inside, she went upstairs and found room 311.
There was a small window in the door, through which she could see Marin at the front of the room, looking professional as hell as she taught her students.
Charlotte slipped through the door and took an empty seat in the back row.
It was a small classroom, though, and Marin looked right at her, flashing a warm smile that set Charlotte’s heart racing all over again.
“As we dig deeper into the relationship between causation and correlation, let’s look at a real-world example.
A recent study found a correlation between the number of hours a student spends on social media and their academic grades.
” She clicked a button on her laptop, and a graph appeared on the screen beside her.
“But does spending more time online distract students from their studies, resulting in lower grades, or do students who are already struggling academically turn to social media as a form of escape? This is where causation comes into play, and it’s crucial when analyzing data not to jump to conclusions.
” Marin looked so confident up there, so natural and in command.
Her entire demeanor was different from that of the casual woman Charlotte had known.
She sounded smart, competent. Who knew statistics could be sexy?
“Confirmation bias can cause you to interpret the results in a way that reinforces your existing beliefs. In my previous example, it would be all too easy for parents to see those results and conclude that they need to limit their child’s time on social media to improve their grades rather than looking deeper at the underlying reasons that the student is struggling.
“Now consider a different scenario.” She stared right at Charlotte, then winked. “How many of you read your horoscope at least once a week?”
Charlotte raised her hand. Probably a third of the class also had a hand in the air.
“Who wants to tell me how confirmation bias could affect how you interpret the contents of your horoscope?” Marin swept her gaze around the room, nodding at a young woman in the front row.
“We’re more likely to notice the parts of the horoscope that apply to us and disregard the rest,” she said.
“Exactly.” Marin gave her an approving look. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s stomach had tightened because she wasn’t sure where Marin was going with this. Was she taking a dig at the way they’d met?
“Aww, come on, Professor E. Don’t hate on horoscopes,” another student called out, voicing Charlotte’s concern.
Marin chuckled. “I’m not hating on them. In fact, if I’ve learned anything over the last few years, it’s this: Not everything can be explained by statistical models, even when you account for the margin of error. Sometimes, you have to trust your instincts and believe in the unbelievable.”