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Thursday.

“I think you’re twenty-two and healthy and American and you’ll walk out of this with a story. I think you have lost nothing.” And there it is, the floor under the floor, the thing I have not let myself look at.

“I went to the library,” he says. “I stood in front of the shelf and I read every spine they’ve got, and there isn’t—”

He stops. I hear it land. I want it back the second it is out and there is no getting it back.

So I do the cowardly thing. I go into the one room he cannot follow me into.

“Toute ma vie j’ai tout sacrifié pour rien. Pis toi, qu’est-ce que t’as perdu? Rien. Tu peux m’jeter comme une guenille pis ça t’coûtera rien pantoute.” You can throw me out like a dishcloth and it will cost you nothing at all.

It is cheap and ugly, and I want it to reach him as noise because it is so unbelievably mean.

He goes still. Something comes into his face that I have never once seen there. And then he answers me. In English, so that every word arrives.

“I understood that.”

The floor tilts.

“I’m a full semester ahead of my class. Coming from nothing. And my accent’s good. It’s real good. I’ve been working my ass off listening to French podcasts while you thought I was doing statistics. I was going to surprise you. I’ve been learning your language so you’d have one more reason to keep me around. You’re a real fucking piece of work, Sébastien Saint-Jacques.”

I don’t know what to say. I want to get on my hands and knees and beg his forgiveness and tell him I didn’t mean it. But I did mean it, and he knows that. He might not have understood every word, but he heard the shape of it. He heard enough. So I hear my own voice go dry and level and academic, and I listen to it the way you listen to a stranger on a train.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the destruction of my entire life’s work was something I was meant to take on the chin. Is that an Army thing?”

“No.” He doesn’t blink. “The Army thing is you take what you can’t change and you make the best of it. You don’t sit in a chair for two days letting it rot on you. And you don’t make everybody around you carry how bad you’re taking it.”

“Oh. I see. So, if I were to just grow a fucking spine, everything would be fine. Who are we kidding? It’d be better than fine. Because didn’t you know, I did all that fancy schooling to get myself a husband. And lookit! Here we are!”

He looks at me for a moment longer, then he lifts both hands in surrender. “Whatever,” he says, and walks to the bedroom.

I sit in the gray. I’m shaking and I don’t want him to see it, so I keep my hands in my lap long after he closes the door.

I don’t want him to hate me. I want him to come back out of that bedroom and put his arms around me and be furious on my behalf, at the committee, at the whole machine, so that for one minute I am not carrying it by myself. I want to be taken care of. And I have just spent the last of my strength making that impossible.

I stay at the table until the gray goes black, and then I crawl onto the couch we christened and pull a thin blanket over myself, so that I can get enough sleep at least to prepare for tomorrow. I am thirty-one years old and I am frightened, and there is nobody left in the room to carry this with me.

Chapter forty-eight

Levi

Idid not sleep. Somewhere past four I quit trying and lay there with my eyes sanded, listening to the propane tick. Every time I shut them I hear him. You have lost nothing. All of that pent-up rage spilling out of him.

I can almost hear Momma saying that a man wants a job to feel useful. I could do with that. I am itching to do something. Anything. The bed is cold and empty. When I come into the living room, he’s still sleeping on the couch. I pull the blanket over his shoulders and go out into the cold with nowhere to be for an hour, and then drive to campus.

Our faces are on the covers of both the Excelsior and the Buzz. I buy the first one, from the rack outside the Bean Stop. It has pictures from our wedding. The Buzz is the free campus paper, and for once every rack on campus is empty by nine. The picture there is taken from the interview in Rock Creek Park. I glance at the byline and am totally unsurprised to see Cara Finch’s name there. I had hoped she could have come to us for the second interview first.

The coverage in the Excelsior is a little more hostile. The headline reads Scandal Rocks Fairhaven Psychology Dept. It doesn’t take me more than three seconds of scanning before I hit the word scandal twice, controversial research, and much-younger student. The reporter then smugly asserted we were “unavailable for comment,” which is a load of bullshit, because I have a lot of comments I’d like to hand over, and if anybody had ever called me from the paper I’d have done so.

The Buzz is more nuanced. The headline at the top says STOPPED IN THE NAME OF LOVE. There are pictures—color pictures, I might add—of my wedding, of Bastien and me at home, and, of course, of me kissing him at Rock Creek Park.

I take it into class.

I only have time to skim over it before Molly Baker comes in and starts setting up her things to start the lecture. Cara’s article doesn’t make us look too bad, which irritates me because this is the one with the smallest reach. It points out that we entered this relationship before arriving at the university, but kindly omits that it was only a few days before. It has made it seem like we had a serious relationship going on for months. Bastien comes across like a dutiful, conscientious man asked to do the quiet balance between two irreconcilable forces. I, depending on how you read the article, am either a fool in love or a single-minded predator determined to force his hand. It’s not a flattering portrayal.

Nowhere, even in this kinder and gentler article, does the article correct that read.

From the right angle, he’s not a husband. He’s a captive.