Chapter 12
I didn't see him for three days.
It wasn't that I expected him to appear again outside the bookshop, or to materialise at the café near campus, or to find some obscure reason to send me another message that could have been half the length but somehow wasn't. But I noticed his absence anyway.
The silence was louder than it should have been.
By Friday, I gave up pretending I wasn't waiting for something—anything—from him. That was when I opened my laptop and found a single email. No subject line, no greeting, just a single sentence:
You looked like you wanted to say something the other night.
I stared at it longer than was reasonable, replaying the moment outside my building, the way he'd looked at me before leaving. He wasn't wrong—I had wanted to say something. I just didn't know what it was until I didn't have the chance.
I typed back before I could second-guess myself: And you looked like you didn't want to hear it.
His reply came in under ten minutes. Not true.
That was it. No explanation. Just those two words.
I left it alone, partly because I didn't know how to respond, and partly because I wanted him to make the next move.
It didn't take long.
Saturday afternoon, I was in my tiny kitchen making tea when my phone buzzed with a text from an unfamiliar number.
Unknown: Are you busy?
Me: Depends on why you're asking.
Unknown: Walk with me.
I hesitated. Part of me wanted to pretend I had other plans. The other part—louder, reckless—grabbed my coat.
He was waiting at the corner. This time, he didn't waste words. He just started walking, and I fell into step beside him.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"You'll see."
We crossed streets, passed rows of houses with ivy creeping up their brickwork, and eventually reached the river. The wind off the water was sharp enough to sting, but it cleared my head.
He stopped by the railing, leaning on it with both hands. "You hide," he said suddenly, without looking at me.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You hide behind jokes, behind work, behind looking like you've got it all under control. But you don't fool me."
"Arrogant much?" I tried to keep my tone light, but the words had landed deeper than I expected.
He finally turned his head to look at me. "Maybe. Or maybe I've just been paying attention."
I hated that my chest tightened at that. "Why are we here, exactly?"
"Because you can't hide out here. There's nowhere to put up walls when it's just open air and the river."
We stood in silence for a while, watching the water shift and curl under the fading light. I wanted to tell him he was wrong. I wanted to tell him that I didn't hide, that I was perfectly fine the way I was. But the truth was, I liked that he'd noticed.
When we finally turned back toward the city, he said, "Next time, you pick the place."
"Next time?" I asked.
"Unless you're planning on avoiding me again."
"I wasn't avoiding you," I lied.
He smiled, and I felt it like a physical thing. "Good."
We walked the rest of the way in easy silence, and when we reached my building, he didn't say goodnight this time. He just gave me a look—something unreadable but warm—and left.
I told myself I wouldn't think about him after that. I told myself it was just a walk, just a conversation. But lying in bed later, listening to the city outside, I knew I was lying.
The days after, campus had the strange hum of term settling in. Students returned from whatever gap months had given them—some tanned and sunburned, others pale and clutching new notebooks—and the department seemed busier, fuller. For me, it was distraction in the best sense: lectures to refine, office hours to hold, essays to mark. Work was not an escape; it was an occupied, meaningful thing. I fell into it with a gratefulness that felt a little like relief.
On Monday, there was a seminar with visiting scholars from the university across the water. Really, visiting academics who always said interesting things and sometimes slipped into being boring. He wasn't among them—at least not officially—but as I stepped into the room, I felt the same strange expectation I did when someone leaves a light on in a house too late.
The seminar moved along; I spoke on metaphors, and then on the small cruelties of irony in romantic poetry. Students nodded. One asked a question that revealed she'd read beyond the required text—the sort of small, sharp joy that makes teaching worth it. Later, in the corridor, an older colleague tapped my shoulder and asked if I'd contribute to the departmental reading list. I said yes, because yes felt polite and safe.
After the seminar, I was in the staff room, idly making tea, when someone bumped into the door and then into me. He apologized, and for a split second I thought it was him. Then I realised it was Mark from administration, a man with a tie that never sat straight and a cheery obliviousness that made meetings bearable. He nodded and moved on.
Hours later, my inbox pinged with a message from an unknown address. There was an attachment. My heart knocked against my ribs as if the attachment might be something trivial—a paper to grade, a flyer to circulate. Instead, it was a photograph. A simple snapshot: the same river we'd stood beside, taken from the bridge late in the evening, light catching the water as if it were a spill of silver. There was no caption, no message, only the photo.
I turned it over, as if there might be an answer written on the back. Nothing.
Later, that evening, someone left a slim book on the small table by my door. No note. No name. Just the book—an old edition of Rilke, the spine soft with use. I ran my fingers over the embossed letters and thought of his fingers on the record sleeve, the quiet way he'd handed things to me. My phone buzzed, and it was a text: Did you like the picture?
I typed: Yes. Then, more honestly, Why?
His reply arrived almost at once: Because you liked the river. Because I thought you might like to see it without me talking.
There was a steadiness to his reasons that felt like a promise without the word. I left the book on my lap and sat there for a long time, feeling the small domestic life of the flat settle around me as if it had been waiting to be inhabited differently.
On Tuesday, I found myself arranging the book on my shelf between texts on poetics and an anthology I'd taught from for years. It felt absurdly intimate to have something he'd chosen pressed between my trusted texts. The absurdity was delicious.
A week later, the invitations arrived: formal-looking cards announcing that Maisie and Liam had picked a date. The address was ornate, the font deliberately old-fashioned. Mum asked me if I'd come home for the weekend to help with the guest list. Help was the euphemism. "Be there, darling," she said. "We'll be thrilled."
I agreed.
"You don't have to," my friend Nora said when I mentioned it over coffee. "You could send your regrets, make an excuse."
"And miss the spectacle?" I replied. There was something in me that wanted to see it through—not to be spiteful or anyone's antagonist, but because I was curious how the story that had run through my head for months would look in real life. Because closure is sometimes only full when you witness it.
She looked at me, pity and something else mingling in her eyes. "Just promise me you'll look after yourself."
"I will," I said, because it sounded like the truth.
The week folded into itself. Days compressed with seminars, coffee breaks, small talk, and the odd long walk with him—planned mostly by him, if I'm honest. Each of those walks felt less accidental and more like rehearsals for something neither of us would name yet. We shared coffee, music, the quiet habit of watching people pass by, commenting on how they wore their joy or their weariness.
On the Thursday before the weekend I would spend with my parents, he suggested something that pulled the carpet out from under me: "Come to the lecture I'm giving on Friday. It's light—more a conversation than a talk. I'd like you there."
It was a curious request. He was no official faculty member; he had appeared in my life as a stranger and kept unfolding in private ways. Yet the lecture was in the listings, billed under a visiting researcher. My curiosity spiked. Part of me wanted to refuse, to keep the separation between public and private intact, but another part—the part that had come alive in the past weeks—wanted to see him in the light of a roomful of people, to see if the man who leaned on my shoulder in cafés was the same person who stepped into a lectern.
"Of course," I said before I could talk myself out of it.
That night, I told my mum I had a work thing, but she read my face and fell silent. Sometimes the truth is more complicated than a lie and less explosive than a story. I packed a small bag in case I needed to escape the weekend's rehearsed smiles.
On Friday morning, the lecture theatre filled with people shifting into chairs, the air smelling faintly of takeaway coffee and anticipation. He moved differently on stage—more measured, a cadence to his words that made me listen like someone learning a new language. He referenced a poem and then a scholar, tied a thread between them and then made it sing like a new thing. People laughed in the right places. He smiled in the pauses.
When he looked at me from the lectern, I felt a small electric current run through my spine, like someone had touched the wrong wire and it was brilliant and mildly alarming. After the lecture, there was the ritual hubbub of questions and polite conversation. He came down to the front row with the same surety he had in the shop.
"You were there," he said simply.
"I wouldn't miss it," I replied, and meant it.
He stayed until the end, and when the crowd thinned, he took my hand—briefly, not theatrically—and said, "I wanted to show you who I am when I don't have the occasional comfort of the anonymous page."
It wasn't a full confession. It didn't need to be. The week ahead still held the small domestic cruelties of the engagement preparations, and I would go home and put on smiles and wave napkins and pretend that my heart had found some tidy hem to tuck itself into.
But there was something else now, threaded into the fabric of the week: a possibility. Not a promise, and not an escape. Just a small opening, a space that shifted when he stood in it. And sometimes that is enough to keep you moving forward.