Terms

Dr. Eckersley's office is at the top of the Pellingham's west tower, up a spiral staircase that was clearly designed to exhaust sinners. By the time you reach the top, your thighs are burning and Oliver, behind you, isn't even breathing hard. You hate him a little more for it. It's comforting, honestly. Something normal.

The office is round, crammed with books, and so cold you can see the dean's breath, except it isn't the dean, it's Eckersley, who has never in your three years of working for her turned on the heat before November first.

She sits. She does not invite you to.

"Card," she says, and holds out her hand.

Oliver takes Revell's key card from his back pocket and lays it in her palm. She looks at it the way you'd look at a dead mouse the cat left on your pillow.

"Professor Revell's," she says. "Lent to you during business hours, I assume, for the Aldine boxes."

"Yes."

"And at midnight you were in the cage. Not with the Aldine boxes. With the sermons. Doing what, Mr. Grayle?"

"Reading," he says.

Eckersley's eyebrows climb toward her steel-gray hair. "In the dark."

"I had a flashlight."

"You did not." She turns to you. "And you, Ms. Mazur, followed a noise into a secured vault without radioing Mr. Hannigan, which is in the manual on page four, and then let the door close."

"Yes," you say. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be correct." She sets the card on her desk. For a long moment she just looks at the two of you, standing side by side like children outside a principal's office, your coat still smelling faintly of him. "Do either of you know what I'm required to do?"

"Report it," Oliver says. His voice is perfectly level. "To the department. And the Trevanion committee."

"Yes."

He nods once, as if he's been told the weather. You see his jaw, though. You see the muscle there jump.

"I'm not going to," Eckersley says.

You both stare at her.

"Mr. Grayle returns this card to Professor Revell today, with whatever lie he likes about why he's done with it. And neither of you says one word about last night to anyone. Not to friends, not to lovers, not to your mothers." She doesn't look at Oliver when she says mothers, and he doesn't flinch, and you notice both of those things. "In exchange, I didn't see either of you. I have enough paperwork."

"Why?" Oliver asks, before you can.

Eckersley takes off her reading glasses and lets them fall on their chain. She suddenly looks older and very tired.

"Because I've worked in this building for thirty-six years," she says, "and in that time I have watched Horatio Revell collect young scholars the way some men collect first editions. He finds the brilliant ones. He keeps them under glass. And when he's finished reading them, he puts them on a high shelf and never takes them down again." She folds her hands. "I'd hate to hand him a reason to start early. Get out. Ava Mazur, you're on tonight at six. Don't be late."

You don't tell Clio.

That's how you know something's wrong with you. Clio Stallworth has been your roommate for three years; she's a classicist with red curls and a laugh you can hear from the street, and you tell her everything. You told her when your father's hours got cut. You told her when you cried in the shower after your qualifying exams. You told her, at length and with diagrams, every single thing Oliver Grayle has ever done to you.

"Ava, you look like death," she says when you stumble into the apartment on Larch Street at seven-fifteen in the morning. "Where were you?"

"Fell asleep at the desk."

"At the library?"

"Swale," you say, which explains everything, and go to bed.

You lie there with the light coming gray through the blinds and think about Oliver's head on your shoulder, the weight of it, how he breathed like someone who hadn't slept properly in a month. You think about Ollie, if you are reading this. You think about how he said thank you to no one, about how he didn't say it at all.

You fall asleep furious and you don't know at whom.

Revell's seminar meets again on Thursday. You walk in braced for anything: a knowing look, a smirk, a joke at your expense, a whispered word to Revell. You've built a whole speech in your head for when he makes some crack about the vault.

Oliver Grayle is in his chair at Revell's right hand, immaculate in a navy coat, and he looks at you exactly the way he's looked at you for four years: like you're a footnote he disagrees with.

It is, absurdly, a relief.

Today's paper is yours, revised. You fix footnote fourteen. You present again. And then, from Revell's other side, comes a voice like a cut-glass decanter.

"May I?"

Dr. Yvaine Brackwater is Revell's postdoc, two years out of Oxford, ice-blonde hair in a perfect knot, a camel coat over her chair and a face so beautiful it's practically a professional advantage. She smiles at you the way cats smile at birds.

"It's charming," she says, "but surely the problem is that it's so personal. You're not reading Swale. You're rescuing her. One does wonder what you're rescuing her from."

A few people laugh. You feel heat crawl up your neck. You open your mouth.

"She's rescuing her from bad scholarship," Oliver says.

Every head turns.

He hasn't looked up from his notes. He turns a page. "The 1797 review was reprinted nine times in four years. It was quoted in Parliament. Aldine's own letters to his brother call it my execution of the Ludlow woman. Mazur's reading isn't personal. It's documented. If you'd like to call the evidence charming, Yvaine, you'll have to do it to the archive."

Silence.

Revell chuckles into it, warm as a fire. "Well. The finalists close ranks. How sweet."

Yvaine's smile doesn't move, but something behind it does. She looks at Oliver like she's known him a very long time and is filing this away.

Oliver still doesn't look at you. Not once, for the rest of the hour. When the seminar ends he's gone before you've put your pen away.

At eleven-thirty you take the reading copy down with hands that are not quite steady.

Letter XIV. Under your note about villains, new pencil, the same slanted, elegant hand.

F. I don't think you want a villain. I think you want someone to have been paying attention. For what it's worth, someone always is.

And below it, smaller, as if added later:

Do you ever think the people we fight hardest are the ones we're most afraid will see us? V.

You read it three times. You touch the pencil with your fingertip like it might still be warm.

You don't answer. You don't know how.

You lock up at one. You walk home through the wet leaves on Chapel Street with your hands in your pockets and the whole night ringing in your head, Vellum and Oliver and the cold of the cage, until you can't tell which voice is which.

You're brushing your teeth when your phone buzzes on the sink.

Unknown number.

This is Grayle. Eckersley gave me your number so I could apologize properly. I don't do that.

The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

I'm told I owe you a coffee and six hours. Why didn't you hit the alarm, Mazur?

You stand there with toothpaste on your lip, staring at it. For four years you've had an answer for everything Oliver Grayle has ever said to you.

Your thumb hovers over the screen.