Six Hours

For a long moment neither of you moves.

Then Oliver is on his feet, past you, both palms flat against the vault door. He shoves. It doesn't so much as shiver. Twelve inches of steel, a bank-vault lock, a railroad widow's money.

"No," he says to it. "No, no. Absolutely not."

"It's a time lock." Your voice comes out steadier than you feel. "It opens at six."

"I'm aware of how a time lock works, Mazur."

"Then stop pushing it."

He turns around. Under the single caged bulb his face is blotched and furious, and he's scrubbing at it with the heel of his hand like he can erase the last five minutes. The blue letter is crushed in his other fist.

There's a red panel beside the door. EMERGENCY RELEASE: ALARM WILL SOUND. You both look at it at the same time.

You know exactly what happens if you press it. Sirens. Campus police. Bede Hannigan, the night guard, lumbering down the stairs with his crossword. A report on Dean Quarrie's desk by eight: Oliver Grayle, found in the rare-books vault after hours with a key card issued to Professor Revell. The Trevanion rules are four pages long and one of them is about conduct. He'd be out before lunch.

Oliver knows it too. You watch him do the math. You watch him decide not to beg.

"Well," he says, very quietly. "Go on, then."

Your hand lifts toward the panel.

It stops there.

You don't know why. You think about the sound he was making, alone on the floor, a sound that had nothing to do with fellowships. You think about how, if it were you, you'd rather die than have him be the one who saw.

You lower your hand and sit down on the step stool by the door. You are Ava Mazur, you have wanted this fellowship more than anything in your life, and you fold your hands in your lap.

"It's cold," you say. "Sit down before you fall down."

He stares at you like you've started speaking Aramaic.

The cage is forty degrees and smells like the inside of an old glove. By one o'clock you've both given up pretending you aren't freezing. He has a cashmere sweater. You have a thrifted wool coat that weighs as much as a small child.

"Come here," you say finally, irritated, and hold one side of it open.

"I'd rather freeze."

"You'd rather freeze than sit next to me."

"Yes."

"Fine. I'll tell the dean you died of pride. It'll go on your headstone."

A long pause. Then Oliver Grayle sits down on the stone floor beside you, stiff as a plank, and lets you drape half the coat over his shoulder. He's warm. Of course he is.

You don't ask about the letter. You want to. It's sitting on his knee, half unfolded, and you can't help seeing the first line in looping, slanting handwriting: Ollie, if you are reading this,

Ollie. Nobody on earth calls him Ollie.

Near the fold there's a brown spot, a constellation of rusty freckles across the paper. Without thinking, the way you'd touch any page at work, you reach out and brush it with one fingertip.

"That's just foxing," you say. "Damp gets into the paper. It doesn't hurt the ink."

He goes completely still.

Not offended. Something else. He looks at your finger on the paper, and then at your face, as if he's reading it for the first time.

"What?" you say.

"Nothing, Ava." It's the first time he has ever used your first name, and he doesn't seem to notice he's done it. He folds the letter, slowly, and puts it inside his sweater against his chest. "It's private."

"I wasn't going to read it."

"You were going to read it."

"I was going to read the first line. I did read the first line. I'm a scholar, Grayle, I read everything." You pull the coat tighter. "I'm not going to ask."

"Good."

"I'm not going to tell anyone, either."

That makes him turn his head. Up close his eyes are not plain gray; they're the color of a sky over the ocean right before it changes its mind.

"Why?" he says.

You don't have an answer, so you give him a question. "How did you get Revell's card?"

"I'm his research assistant. He lends it to me for the Aldine boxes." A beat. "During the day."

"So you stole it."

"I borrowed it at night. It's a distinction you'd appreciate if you'd ever been anywhere you weren't supposed to be."

"I have been in a locked vault with you for forty minutes. I think I qualify."

To your shock, the corner of his mouth moves. It isn't a smile. It's the place a smile would go, if he let it.

Two o'clock. Three. The cold gets into your teeth. You talk because it's that or listen to the radiator on the other side of the wall gurgling like a dying man.

You talk about Swale, because it's the only thing you have in common.

"Forty letters," he says, his head tipped back against the sermons. "To someone she never names. Dear Adversary. Two hundred years and nobody's found a single reply."

"Revell thinks it's her publisher."

"Revell thinks a great many things in print that he doesn't believe at dinner." He says it lightly. Then he seems to hear himself and shuts his mouth.

"What do you think?"

He's quiet for a while. "I think you don't write I would rather quarrel with you than be agreed with by the whole of London to the man who sets your type."

You turn to stare at him. "Letter twenty-two. You know them by heart."

"So do you."

"I'm supposed to. It's my dissertation."

"It's mine too. I'm just better at pretending I don't care." He says it to the ceiling. "It's a useful skill. You should acquire it."

"Like you did at orientation?"

There it is. You hadn't meant to say it. Four years of it, right there in the cold.

He closes his eyes. "You remember that."

"This reads like someone apologizing for being in the room. Yes, Grayle. I remember that."

He doesn't defend himself. That's the strangest thing about the whole strange night. Oliver Grayle, who has never in four years let a single point go undefended, just sits there with his eyes shut and says nothing at all, and after a while his breathing changes, and his head tips sideways, and it lands on your shoulder.

You sit very, very still until the clock reads 5:40.

He wakes with a start, sees where he is, and jerks upright as if he's been burned. For a second he looks about nineteen.

"You could have ended me tonight," he says. His voice is rough with sleep. "One button. You'd have won. Why didn't you?"

You open your mouth. You still don't know.

Outside, the mechanism in the wall hums and clicks. The lock releases with a heavy clunk. And before either of you can stand, the vault door swings outward.

Dr. Ursula Eckersley stands on the other side in her long black coat, reading glasses on their chain, a ring of keys in her hand and an expression that could freeze the Charles River.

"Ms. Ava Mazur," she says, as if reading a catalog entry. "And Mr. Grayle." She looks at you. She looks at him. She looks, for a long moment, at your coat around his shoulders.

"My office," she says. "Both of you."