Chapter 9 #2
“If she files a formal complaint, your scholarship is revoked. Your thesis is dead. You’ll be removed from the program.
” Each sentence is placed on the desk between us like a stone.
“If the university investigates and finds evidence of an inappropriate relationship between a student and a faculty member, your academic record is flagged permanently. Every graduate program, every employer, every recommendation—it follows you.”
“I know what the consequences are.”
“Then you know this has to stop.”
He’s not asking or agonizing. He’s doing what he does when something threatens a system he’s responsible for: he eliminates the vulnerability.
I’m the vulnerability.
“She can’t prove anything.” My voice is even. My hands are still. “We haven’t done anything that—“
“She doesn’t need proof.” His voice cuts through mine without rising.
“She needs suspicion. She needs the F on your paper and a formal review on your file and a hallway where she saw you leaving my office at nine PM with your hair undone. She needs a room full of scholarship students hearing her talk about professors and personal arrangements, and she needs one of them to look at you and wonder.”
My throat tightens. Because he’s right. Agnes doesn’t need evidence.
She needs a story, and the story she’s building—the farm girl, the powerful professor, the late nights, the closed doors—writes itself, and it doesn’t matter that the truth is more complicated than the story, because the story is the thing with teeth.
“So what are you saying?” I ask, and my voice is smaller than I want it to be, and I hate that, I hate that Agnes Cuthbert has made me small in this office where I once stood six inches from this man and told him I would never hurt him.
“This is done, Miss Lively.”
The name hits like a closed fist.
Not Elsa. Miss Lively. The barricade. The formality. The proper distance he had set aside for me, rebuilt in a single word.
This is done. Not go home, Elsa, said tender and aching. This is a man slamming a door with both hands and bracing his weight against it.
“Don’t.” My voice breaks in the way I don’t want it to. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s already done.”
“No, it isn’t. You don’t get to decide that alone.
” I’m rising to my feet as I make my case, feeling like everything’s about to fall apart.
“She smiled at me in that hallway because she knew this would happen. She knew that if she pushed hard enough, you’d cut me off.
Not because you’re afraid of her. Because you’re afraid of me. ”
His jaw locks.
“You’re afraid that I’ll stay,” I say. “That I’ll sit in your third row and draw my circles and look at you the way I’ve always looked at you, and that it’ll cost me everything, and you can’t stand it. You’d rather lose me clean than watch me lose my future.”
“You don’t understand what I’m capable of.
” His voice has dropped to something I haven’t heard before.
Below everything else. This is the basement.
This is the place where the boy who ran at fourteen keeps the things he ran from.
“What my name brings to anyone standing near me. You think Agnes is the threat. Agnes is a bureaucrat with a grudge. The threat is me. It’s always been me. ”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s true.” He looks at me with eyes that have gone flat, deliberate, emptied of everything I’ve come to know about the man behind the title. He’s taken all of it and locked it away, and what’s left is the professor. The wall. “And this is done.”
Three words. This is done.
My finger is frozen against my own thigh. No motion. No loop. Just pressure.
I pick up my bag. I look at him across the desk, across the distance he’s putting between us with surnames and silence and the particular cruelty of a man who thinks destroying something is the same as saving it.
“If that’s what you need to tell yourself.”
I open the door...and he doesn’t stop me from leaving. The hallway is fluorescent and empty, and I walk into it, and the door closes behind me, and the click of the latch is the quietest, most violent sound I’ve ever heard.
THE BATHROOM IS AT the end of the hall.
Fourteen steps. I count them. My flats on the tile, one after another, my bag on my shoulder, my back straight, my chin up, because Agnes Cuthbert could be around any corner and I won’t give her the satisfaction, I won’t give anyone the satisfaction, I’ll walk this hallway like Robert Lively’s daughter and I’ll hold myself together until I’m behind a door that locks.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
My vision blurs at step ten. I blink it clear.
Twelve. Thirteen.
Fourteen.
The bathroom door swings in. Empty. Two stalls, a row of sinks, a mirror that catches my face as I pass it, and I make it into the far stall and I lock the door and I press my back against the cold partition and my bag slides off my shoulder and hits the floor and I drop.
Hard, onto the tile, and my hands find the floor and they’re shaking so badly that my fingers can’t grip anything, they just scrape against the grout, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t a cry.
It’s the sound of something being pulled apart at a seam that was never meant to open.
My forehead drops to my knees. My hands fist in my dress, and the fabric bunches under my fingers and I hold on because I need to hold something and there’s nothing else, there’s no hand reaching for mine, no thumb drawing circles on my wrist, no voice saying my name with an accent that makes the vowels bloom.
He called me Miss Lively.
He made this decision before I walked into his office, before I sat down, before I opened my mouth. He decided, and then he let me walk in and sit in that chair and hope, and then he cut.
My circle starts. On my own knee, through the fabric. Small, shaky, barely a circle at all. More of a tremor with a shape.
I cry the way I do everything. Quietly. My father taught me that tears aren’t something to be ashamed of, but they’re private, like prayers, and you don’t perform them for an audience.
So I cry in a bathroom stall with my forehead on my knees and my hands in my dress and my circle going nowhere, and the tiles are cold under me and the fluorescent hum is the only sound in the room, and somewhere on the other side of this building, in an office that smells like old books and clean cotton and the subtle Italian thing that I’ll never get out of my memory, a man is sitting behind his desk with a folder full of paperwork that says I was never his.
My phone buzzes.
I don’t look at it. I can’t. My hands are too full of fabric and shaking and the effort of holding myself together.
But the buzz is insistent, a second one following the first, and my traitorous heart leaps because some stupid, stubborn part of me thinks it might be him, thinks he might have picked up his phone the second I walked out and typed something in Italian that his control couldn’t hold back—
I pull it out. Wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand.
Two texts. Not from Luciano.
From Mama.
Baby girl, just checking in. Daddy fixed the east fence AGAIN. Says hi. Call when you can. Love you to the moon.
And underneath, a second one, sent forty seconds later:
Also your father wants to know if you’ve eaten today. He won’t ask himself because he’s “not a worrier.” Direct quote. He’s ABSOLUTELY a worrier.
A sound comes out of me. Half laugh, half sob, ugly and wet and entirely Martha Lively’s daughter.
I press the phone against my chest and I sit on the bathroom floor and I laugh-cry until my ribs ache, because my mother somehow, from three thousand miles away, from a farmhouse where the kettle whistles and the fences need fixing and a man with a bad hip pretends he’s not worried—my mother reached through the phone and held me, and she doesn’t even know I need it.
I type back. My fingers are still shaking.
Tell Daddy I ate a muffin. Love you both. Call Sunday.
I press Send. I close my eyes. My circle has stopped.
The fluorescent light hums above me. The bathroom is empty.
The building is emptying. And somewhere beyond these walls, in a hallway I just walked through with my chin up and my back straight, a man who kissed me like I was the last real thing in the world just told me I’m nothing, and I believed him for exactly fourteen steps, and then I fell apart, and now I’m sitting on a bathroom floor with mascara on my knees and my mother’s love on my phone and the ruins of something beautiful folded inside my notebook next to a letter on department letterhead.
I don’t know how long I sit there.
Long enough for the shaking to stop. Long enough for my breathing to even out, for my hands to dry, for the cold tile to go numb under me. Long enough to hear footsteps in the hallway, distant, fading, doors closing one by one as the building empties.
I stand. My legs hold. I wash my face at the sink.
The mirror shows me a girl with red eyes and a jaw set tight, and I look at her and I think: You’re Elsa Lively.
You earned your place here. You were somebody before he kissed you and you’ll be somebody after, and if Agnes Cuthbert thinks a letter on cream paper can take that from you, she’s never met a girl who watched her parents sell a tractor and swore she would make it worth it.
My finger lifts to the edge of the sink. One circle. Slow. Wobbly.
But it moves.
I pick up my bag. I straighten my dress. I walk out of the bathroom and down the hall and through the building doors and into the cold, and I don’t look at his office on the way past.
But I hear it through the door, through the wood, through the brass nameplate that I once traced with my eyes like a love letter I couldn’t send.
The sound of something breaking.
Not glass. Not furniture. Something worse. Something that sounds like a man’s fist hitting his own desk, once, hard, and then silence.
I keep walking.