Chapter 11
AGNES CUTHBERT’S OFFICE smells like lilies.
Not real ones but something bottled, something that sits in a crystal diffuser on the corner of her desk between a brass lamp and a framed photograph I can’t see from this angle.
The scent is expensive and deliberate, the olfactory equivalent of her silk blouses and her pencil skirts and the way she says warm regards like she’s sharpening a letter opener.
I’m sitting across from her in a chair nicer than the one in Luciano’s office. Upholstered, cushioned, the kind that invites you to settle in. A chair designed to make you comfortable before someone makes you uncomfortable.
“Thank you for making the time, Miss Lively.” Agnes folds her hands on the desk. Her nails are perfect. Her lipstick is the color of dried roses. Her smile is the one from the hallway—the one with teeth. “I know your schedule must be very full.”
“I’m happy to be here, Professor Cuthbert.”
I’m not. My hands are in my lap, flat against my thighs, perfectly still. No circles. I haven’t drawn a circle in weeks, and the absence of them is something I carry the way you carry a phantom limb—the motion is gone but the need for it pulses at the edges of my fingers, aching.
“I wanted to discuss your scholarship review in person.” She opens a folder.
Cream paper inside, institutional letterhead, the same thick stock as the formal notice that’s been sitting in my notebook for weeks.
“As you know, the review was triggered by a failing grade on your most recent submission.”
“A grade I’ve contested with my advisor.”
“Yes. Dr. Malvar has expressed her support for your work.” Agnes pauses. Lets the pause work. “Dr. Malvar is a wonderful advocate. But she’s not the department chair.”
The room is very quiet. Beyond the door, the hallway hums—fluorescent buzz, distant footsteps, the muffled life of a building that has no idea what’s happening inside this office. The lilies press in. My stomach turns against them.
“Miss Lively, I’ll be direct.” Agnes closes the folder.
Her hands return to the desk, laced, composed.
“I’ve concerns about your trajectory in this program.
Not your academic ability—your file speaks for itself.
But ability isn’t the only metric. Judgment matters.
Conduct matters. The choices a student makes about how she—“ Another pause.
Surgical. “—allocates her time and attention.”
My jaw tightens. I feel it happen—the involuntary clench of a person holding something back—and I think, absurdly, in this awful office with this awful woman: I’ve picked up his habits. His jaw. His stillness. He’s in my body now, and I can’t get him out.
“I’ll speak plainly.” Agnes leans forward.
Her eyes are sharp, clear, the eyes of a woman who has been building toward this moment for weeks and is now standing on the summit of it.
“Some students arrive at this university with backgrounds that, while admirable, leave them unprepared for the realities of academic life at this level. They confuse a professor’s kindness for something personal.
They mistake attention for affection. And when those students come from—“ She tilts her head.
Studies me. “—more provincial environments, the confusion is understandable. Even sympathetic.”
My blood goes cold.
Provincial.
The word sits in the air between us, and it’s not about geography.
It’s not about Nebraska or farms or a father’s spreadsheet or a mother who says oh, my stars.
It’s about me. It’s about who Agnes Cuthbert thinks I am.
A country girl too naive to know the difference between a mentor and a man, too dazzled by attention to see that she’s being used, too provincial to understand the rules of a world she doesn’t belong in.
“Professor Cuthbert.” My voice is even. My hands don’t shake.
My back is straight in her comfortable chair, and I’m looking at this woman the way Robert Lively looks at anyone who underestimates his land.
“I earned a 3.8 GPA. I earned my scholarship. My thesis advisor has called my work one of the strongest undergraduate analyses in the department. I earned my place here.”
Agnes’s smile doesn’t waver. “No one is questioning your intelligence, Miss Lively.”
“Then what are you questioning?”
“Your judgment.” The word snaps, clean and bright.
“A student who spends her evenings in a professor’s office.
A student whose academic performance has—conveniently—been championed by the very professor whose personal attention she’s been receiving.
A student who seems to believe that proximity to power is the same as earning it.
” She tilts her head again, and the smile sharpens.
“Girls like you think a pretty face is a scholarship qualification. I’m here to remind you it isn’t. ”
The sentence hangs.
It hangs in the lily-scented air of this office, between the brass lamp and the crystal diffuser and the folder of cream paper, and I watch Agnes Cuthbert’s face and I see what lives behind the silk and the smile and the institutional authority.
Jealousy. Not the petty kind, not the kind that embarrasses itself.
The kind that has been marinating for years, the kind that watched a man treat her like furniture while something in a cotton dress and sensible flats walked out of his office with flushed cheeks and drew his attention without trying.
This isn’t about my scholarship. This has never been about my scholarship.
I stand.
Agnes’s eyes follow me. Her smile holds, but something behind it shifts—a flicker, the briefest recalculation of a woman who expected tears and isn’t getting them.
“I earned my place, Professor Cuthbert.” My voice carries no heat. No tremor. No anger she can write into a report and file alongside the F she fabricated and the formal review she manufactured. “I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable.”
Eight words. I give them to her the way my father gives a handshake—firm, direct, and final.
I turn. I walk to the door. My hand finds the handle and I open it and I step into the hallway, and the fluorescent hum rushes in like cold water after a held breath.
He’s standing against the far wall.
Luciano is leaning against the hallway wall six feet from Agnes Cuthbert’s office door with his arms at his sides and his jaw set tight.
He isn’t crossing his arms. He isn’t in a suit jacket—just the white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, forearms bare, and the vein I’ve been privately aware of since freshman year is standing out under his skin.
He heard. The walls in this building are old, the doors are thin, and Agnes Cuthbert’s voice carries the way a scalpel carries—sharp and clean and designed to reach exactly as far as she intends.
He heard all of it.
Our eyes meet. In the fluorescent corridor, with Agnes’s door still open behind me, with my back straight and my chin up and my hands at my sides and no circles, no circles anywhere, his eyes find mine and I see what’s in them.
Fury. The same banked, cold fury I saw after Agnes’s department meeting, but worse now, deeper, with something raw behind it that looks like it’s been building for weeks.
And beneath the fury, something that looks like shame.
He straightens off the wall, not looking at me as he walks past me. The door closes behind him as he walks into Agnes’s office.
I DON’T STAY.
I should. Some part of me wants to press my ear to the door and listen to whatever is happening on the other side of it.
But whatever he’s doing in that office is his, and whatever I need to do next is mine, and those are separate things, and I learned that the hard way in a bathroom stall three weeks ago.
I walk out of the building. Across the quad.
The campus garden is on the far side, tucked between the science building and the chapel.
It’s not much—a square of green with iron benches and hedges that need trimming and a few trees that are just beginning to remember what leaves are.
It’s April. The semester is running out.
The trees are bare in a way that looks temporary, skeletal branches holding the shape of something that’s about to come back.
I sit on a bench. My bag beside me. My coat buttoned. The air is cool and damp and smells like wet earth, which is the closest New York gets to Nebraska, and I close my eyes and I breathe.
My hand is resting on the arm of the bench. Iron, cold, painted green and chipping.
My finger moves.
I don’t decide to do it. My body decides, the way it decided in an alley off Lexington when I was eighteen and terrified and my hands found the brick wall and started tracing circles to convince myself I was still whole.
The motion comes from the same place—below thought, below will, from whatever part of me knows how to keep going when the rest has stalled.
One circle. On the cold iron. Slow. Unsteady.
Then another.
The circles are back.
They’re not the tight, frantic loops of the avoidance, and they’re not the warm, wide arcs of the joy window.
They’re something new. Something that shakes a little and doesn’t close cleanly and keeps going anyway, the circles of a girl who sat in a woman’s office and was told she was nothing and walked out without bending and is now sitting on a bench in a garden drawing circles because her hands remember who she is even when the rest of her isn’t sure.
I draw them, and I breathe, and the garden is quiet around me, and I don’t cry.
HIS FOOTSTEPS ARE DIFFERENT.