Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
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.