He nods, looking so concerned, I imagine I could confess anything and he would hear it. I can feel his kindness already, before I say a word.

“Do you know anyone else who works there?” I ask.

“No one,” he says. “Vanessa, what’s wrong?”

“I was raped by a teacher there,” I say. “I was fifteen.” I’m shocked at how smoothly the lie comes out of me, though I don’t know if I’m lying or just not telling the truth. “He’s still there,” I add. “So when you said that you knew someone, it just . . . I panicked.”

Henry brings his hands to his face, to his mouth. He picks his beer back up, sets it down again. Finally, he says, “I’m stunned.”

I open my mouth to clarify, to explain that I’m exaggerating, I shouldn’t use that word, but he speaks first.

“I have a sister,” he says. “Something similar happened to her.”

He looks to me, big sorrowful eyes, each of his features a gentler version of Strane’s. It’s easy to imagine him sinking to his knees, lowering his head into my lap, not to lament how he will inevitably ruin me but instead to mourn that another man already has.

“I’m sorry, Vanessa,” he says. “Though I know that might be a useless thing to hear. I’m just so sorry.”

We’re quiet for a moment, him leaning forward as if he wants to comfort me—his kindness like bathwater, lapping my shoulders, milky and warm. This is more than I deserve.

My eyes fixed on the floor, I say, “Please don’t tell your friend about this.”

Henry shakes his head. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

* * *

On the day after Christmas, I drive to Strane’s house, blasting Fiona Apple and singing my throat on fire. I slouch in my seat as I pass through the downtown streets of Norumbega, leave the car in the library parking lot across from his house, and run to his front door with my hood covering my recognizable hair—precautions dictated by Strane that I’ve followed for so long, I do them without thinking.

Once inside, I’m shifty, darting away from his hands and not looking him in the eye. I worry he knows what I said to Henry. There’s the possibility Henry told his friend and his friend told someone else at Browick; it wouldn’t take much for the gossip to loop back around to Strane. There’s also what I know is impossible but nevertheless half believe: that he knows everything I say and do, that he has the ability to peer inside my mind.

When he surprises me with a wrapped present, I don’t take it at first, worried it’s a trap, that I’ll open the box to find a note saying, I know what you did. He’s never given me a Christmas present before.

“Go on,” he says with a laugh, nudging the gift against my chest.

I stare down at it, a clothing-sized box wrapped in thick gold paper and red ribbon, the work of a retail employee. “But I didn’t get you anything,”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

I peel off the paper. Inside is a thick sweater, dark blue with a cream Fair Isle design around the neck. “Wow.” I lift it from the box. “I love it.”

“You sound surprised.”

I slip the sweater over my head. “I didn’t realize you paid attention to what kinds of clothes I wear.” A stupid thing to say. Of course he pays attention. He knows everything about me, everything I’ve ever been and will be.

He makes us pasta and red sauce—no eggs and toast for once—and sets our plates on the bar, arranges the silverware and folded napkins like it’s a date. He asks what I’m taking next semester, withholding his usual criticism about the course descriptions and reading lists. When I tell him about my finals and the paper I wrote for Henry’s class, he interrupts me.

“That’s the professor,” he says. “Specializes in British lit, came from Texas? That’s him. His wife is that new counselor they brought in for the students.”

I bite down, hard, on my tongue. “Wife?”

“Penelope. Fresh out of grad school, got an LCS—whatever that social work degree is.”

My breathing stops, caught between inhale and exhale.

Strane taps his fork against the rim of my plate. “You all right?”

I nod, force myself to swallow. I have a friend who works there. Friend. He said that. Or am I remembering it wrong? But why would he lie? Maybe he felt so sorry for me that he didn’t want to bring even the idea of another woman into the room. But he mentioned his sister—and besides, the lie would have happened before I said anything about being raped. So why would he lie?

I ask what she’s like, the most banal question I can think of, because I don’t dare ask the ones I really want answers to—what does she look like, is she smart, what kind of clothes does she wear, does she talk about him?—but even though I hold back, Strane still knows. He sees it in me, my ears pricked and hackles raised.

“Vanessa, stay away from him,” he says.

I screw up my face, fake indignation. “What are you talking about?”

“Be a good girl,” he says. “You know what you’re capable of.”

After we eat and the dishes are in the sink, he stops me when I move toward the stairs, up to his bedroom.

“I have to tell you something,” he says. “Come in here.”

As he guides me into the living room, I think again that this is it, the confrontation about what I said. That’s why Strane mentioned Henry—he’s taking it slow, luring me into it. But as he sits me down on the couch, he warns that what he’s about to tell me will sound worse than it actually is, that it’s a misunderstanding, an unfortunate circumstance.

What he says is so at odds with what I’m expecting, I interrupt, “Wait, so this isn’t about anything I did?”

“No, Vanessa,” he says. “Not everything is about you.” He sighs, rakes his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he adds. “I’m nervous, though I don’t know why. If anyone’s going to be understanding, it’s you.”

He says there’s been an incident at Browick. It happened back in October, in his classroom during faculty service hour. He was meeting one-on-one with a student who had questions about an essay. She always had questions about everything, this girl. At first he thought she was merely anxious, a grade worrier, but as she started hanging around the classroom more, he realized she had a crush on him. Truthfully, it reminded him of me—her giddy demeanor, her unguarded adoration.

On this October afternoon, they were sitting at the seminar table, side by side, while he went over her essay draft. She was flustered, practically trembling from anxiety—about the grade, about being so close to him—and at some point during the conference he reached down and patted her knee. He meant it to be reassuring. He was trying to be kind. But the girl took that touch and twisted it into something ugly. She started telling her friends that he’d made a pass at her and that he wanted to have sex with her, that he was sexually harassing her.

I throw up my hand, cutting him off. “Which hand did you use?”

He blinks in surprise.

“When you touched her. Which hand?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Show me,” I say. “I want to see exactly what you did.”

There on the couch, I make him demonstrate. I scoot away from him, leaving a chaste distance, and press my knees together and sit up straight—the nervous pose my body remembers from those times I sat beside him at the very beginning of things. I watch his hand reach down, pat my knee. It’s familiar enough to make me gag.

“It was nothing,” he says.

I shove his hand away. “It’s not nothing. That’s how it started with me, with you touching my leg.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It’s not. You and I started long before I ever laid a hand on you.”

He says this so forcefully, I can tell he’s said it to himself many times before. But if it didn’t start when he first touched me, when did it? When he told me, drunk at the Halloween dance, that he wanted to put me to bed and kiss me good night, or when I began inventing reasons to talk to him after class so I could get him alone and feel his eyes on me? When he wrote on my poem draft, Vanessa, this one scares me a little, or on the first day of classes, when I watched him give the convocation speech, his face dripping with sweat? Maybe the start can’t be pinned down at all. Maybe the universe forced us together, rendering us both powerless, blameless.

“It’s not even comparable,” he says. “This student is nothing to me, the so-called physical contact was nothing. It was a matter of seconds. I certainly don’t deserve to have my life destroyed over it.”

“Why would this destroy your life?”

He sighs, sits back on the couch. “The administration caught wind of it. They’re saying they need to do an investigation. Over a pat on the knee! It’s puritanical hysteria. We might as well be living in Salem.”

I stare him down, try to get him to flinch, but he looks innocent—the lines in his forehead creased in concern, his eyes enormous behind his glasses. Still, I want to be angry. He says the touch was insignificant, but I know how heavy with meaning a touch like that can be.

“Why are you even telling me?” I ask. “Do you want me to tell you it’s ok? That I forgive you? Because I don’t.”

“No,” he says, “I’m not asking you to forgive me. There’s nothing to forgive. I’m sharing this because I want you to understand that I’m still living with the consequences of loving you.”

For a split second, my eyes start to roll. I stop myself, but he still sees.

“Mock me all you like,” he says, “but before you, no one would have jumped to conclusions like this. They never would have believed this girl’s word over mine. These are my colleagues, people I’ve worked with for twenty years. That history means nothing now that my name has been dragged through the mud. Everyone assumes the worst about me. I’ve got eyes on me at all times, constant suspicion. And an uproar over this! My god, a friendly pat on the knee is something I do without thinking. Now it’s evidence of my depravity.”

Exactly how many girls have you touched? The question sits hot on my tongue, yet I don’t say it. I swallow it, burning my throat all the way down, another stomach ember.

“Loving you branded me a deviant,” he says. “Nothing else about me matters anymore. One transgression will define me for the rest of my life.”

We sit in silence, the sounds of his house amplified—the refrigerator hum, the hiss of the steam heat.

I tell him I’m sorry. I don’t want to say it but feel I have to, like he needs to hear it so badly, he’s pulling the words out of me like teeth. I’m sorry you’ll never get out from under the long shadow I cast. I’m sorry what we did together was so horrific, there’s no path back from it.

He forgives me, says it’s all right, then reaches over and pats my knee, until he realizes what he’s doing, stops, and curls his hand into a fist.

When we go to bed on his flannel sheets, we keep our clothes on and I think of this girl he touched, faceless and bodiless, a specter of an accusation and a harbinger of the obvious: that I am getting older, and each passing day brings girls into the world who are younger than me, who might someday end up in his classroom. I imagine them, their bright hair and downy arms, until I’m exhausted, but as soon as my mind tempers down, I recall what he said about Henry, about his wife. Another wing of the labyrinth to get lost in, remembering what I told Henry about Strane, the r-word I used, how he must have gone home that night and told his wife everything. I made him promise not to tell, but the promise was only an extension of his lie. Of course he’d tell his wife. He’d have to—and who would she have to tell? If she’s a counselor, would she be obligated to report it? My mouth goes dry at how easily it could all come back around. I can’t get out of this. I was stupid to think I could say something, anything, without it eventually getting back to Strane.

Around midnight, we hear sirens. First faintly, then closer and closer, until it sounds like they’re outside the house. For a moment I’m sure they’re coming for us, that police are about to burst through the door. Strane gets out of bed and peers out the window into the night.

“I can’t see anything.” He grabs a sweater and heads out of the bedroom, down the stairs to the front door. When he opens it, smoke wafts in with the frigid air, so pungent it soars upstairs, fills the house.

He calls up to me, “There’s a fire down the block. A big one.” After a couple minutes, he returns wearing his parka and boots. “Come on, let’s go see it up close.”

We dress in so many layers we become anonymous, only our eyes showing above our scarves. Walking down the snow-packed sidewalks, he and I could be anyone, could be ordinary. We follow the sirens and smoke, not finding the fire until we turn a corner and see the five-story Masonic temple both ablaze and encased in ice. Six fire trucks park around the perimeter of the building, all hoses on full blast, but the night is too cold. The water, every last bit of it, freezes as soon as it hits the building’s limestone exterior while the flames rage inside. The longer the firefighters try to douse the building, the thicker the ice shell grows.

While we watch, Strane reaches for my mittened hand and holds it tight. The firefighters eventually give up and, like us, stand back and watch the building burn—a small crowd gathers, a news truck arrives. Strane and I stay for a long time, holding hands, both of us blinking back tears that collect in crystals on our eyelashes.

Later, in his bed, body and mind exhausted, I ask, “Is there more you’re not telling me about that girl?” When he doesn’t answer, I ask it plainly: “Did you fuck her?”

“Christ, Vanessa.”

“It’s ok if you did,” I say. “I’ll forgive you. I just need to know.”

He rolls toward me, holds my face in both hands. “I touched her. That’s all I did.”

I close my eyes as he strokes my hair and calls her terrible names: a liar, a little bitch, an emotionally troubled girl. I wonder what he would call me if he knew all the things I’ve called him in my mind over the years, if he finds out what I told Henry. But I say nothing. My silence is so reliable. He has no reason not to trust me.

At three in the morning, I wake and slip out from underneath his heavy arm, pad barefoot on the cold wood floors out of the bedroom, downstairs to the kitchen where his laptop sits on the counter. I open it and the browser loads his Browick email inbox. Weekly newsletters, minutes from faculty meetings—I scroll until I see the subject “Student Harassment Report.” I freeze when I hear something, one hand hovering over the trackpad, the other poised to slap the laptop closed. When silence settles again, I click open the email and scan the text. It’s from the board of trustees, written in language formal to the point of impenetrable, but I don’t want to know the details anyway. I’m just looking for a name. I scroll up and down, eyes darting back and forth across the screen, and then I see it on the second line: Taylor Birch, the student making the claims. I close the email and sneak back upstairs into bed, under his arm.