Chương 3
“Yes.”
“Do you need me to come get you?”
“No.”
“Do you need police?”
I stared at my swollen wrist.
“I don’t know.”
“That can mean yes.”
“I have the defense tomorrow.”
“Mara, forget the defense for one second.”
“I can’t.”
My answer came too quickly.
Hale sighed, not impatiently.
“Fine.”
I heard her chair creak.
“We won’t cancel anything tonight.”
My shoulders dropped.
“But you are not walking into that room pretending nothing happened.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
That was a lie too.
She seemed to hear it.
“Call campus security before you arrive.”
“And send me the latest dissertation archive now.”
I looked at the gym bag.
“I have it.”
“Good.”
“There’s something else.”
I hesitated.
For months, I had treated one portion of my research as a professional embarrassment.
An anomaly.
A result I could not explain cleanly.
A set of irregular transactions buried inside a dataset Julian had helped me obtain from a technology vendor affiliated with his office.
My committee had seen the technical analysis.
They had not seen the names behind the coded accounts.
I had not known the names myself until two days earlier.
That discovery was why Julian had suddenly asked, three separate times, exactly what I planned to present.
Professor Hale went quiet when I explained.
“Mara,” she said carefully, “does Julian know you decoded those records?”
“I didn’t think so.”
“And now?”
I looked at the melted plastic residue still stuck beneath one fingernail.
“Now I think tomorrow was never only about my PhD.”
Hale did not answer immediately.
In the motel corridor, someone laughed loudly, then dropped what sounded like a bucket.
An ice machine rattled to life.
I opened the portable drive.
The folder was still there.
So was the encrypted archive I had created at 2:14 that afternoon.
So was the evidence Julian apparently believed he had burned in our kitchen.
“I’m coming to campus,” Hale said.
“No.”
“Mara.”
“If you come here, he’ll know where I am if he’s monitoring anything connected to me.”
Silence.
“You said campus.”
“I meant tomorrow.”
“You need sleep.”
“I need scissors.”
“What?”
I touched the wreckage of my hair.
For the first time that night, Professor Hale laughed.
It was brief and startled and almost immediately guilty.
“I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said.
“It’s actually pretty bad.”
That made her laugh again.
So did I.
The sound hurt my ribs.
Forty minutes later, using a pair of cheap sewing scissors from the twenty-four-hour pharmacy across the road, I cut away what Eleanor had left uneven.
I did a terrible job at first.
Then I stopped trying to save the old shape.
By two in the morning, my hair was cropped close at the sides and longer on top, imperfect but deliberate enough to pass.
I wrapped a plum scarf around it anyway.
At six fifteen, I showered.
At six forty, I put on the navy blazer I had packed months ago without admitting why.
At seven, I uploaded three copies of my files to places Julian could not reach.
At seven twelve, I sent Professor Hale a message.
I am coming in.
Her answer arrived almost instantly.
Good.
Do not come through the main entrance.
At seven thirty-five, a campus security officer met me beside the service entrance to the engineering building.
At seven forty, Professor Hale saw my face and stopped speaking halfway through my name.
At seven forty-two, I told her I was still defending.
And at seven forty-three, she said the sentence that changed what I believed the next two hours were going to be.
“Then you should know,” she said, closing the office door behind us, “Julian is already here.”
Professor Hale did not move away from the door after saying it.
Her hand remained on the knob, and her mouth tightened in the way it did when a student had made an error too serious to correct with kindness.
“How long?”
“He signed in with the front desk at seven twenty.”
“Why?”
“He told security he was your husband and that you were having some kind of mental health crisis.”
My stomach went cold.
“He said that?”
“He also said you might try to present confidential data you weren’t authorized to possess.”
For a second, I heard nothing but the fluorescent hum above us.
Then I looked at the portable drive in my hand.
“He knows.”
“He knows enough to be afraid.”
Hale crossed to her desk and pushed aside a stack of dissertation drafts.
Her office looked exactly as it always did, which felt almost grotesque.
The same dying fern leaned toward the window.
The same mug with a cracked handle held three pens and a bent mechanical pencil.
A student’s handwritten thank-you card was still tucked beneath the monitor.
Nothing in the room seemed aware that my husband had spent the previous night burning pieces of my life over a kitchen flame.
“What did security do?”
“They asked him to wait downstairs.”
“And he did?”
“So far.”
Hale studied my face.
“Campus police have been notified.”
I flinched.
“You called them?”
“Yes.”
“I asked for security.”
“And security called police after I told them someone destroyed university-related research materials and physically restrained a doctoral candidate the night before her defense.”
Her voice was firm, but not sharp.
“This is bigger than whether you’re comfortable making a report this morning.”
I turned toward the window.
Students crossed the courtyard below carrying coffee and backpacks.
Someone had set up a folding table near the fountain with a hand-lettered sign advertising free bagels for engineering freshmen.
A young man in a red sweatshirt stole two and jogged away while his friend laughed.
“I can’t spend the morning in a police station.”
“No one said you have to.”
“Hale.”
“Mara.”
She rarely used my first name without a title or joke attached.
I faced her again.
“I am not canceling.”
“I know.”
“You were about to tell me to.”
“No.”
May you like
She pulled out her chair and sat.
“I was about to tell you the committee may decide to postpone.”
