When Sunshine Meets Silence

Chapter Three: What Silence Sounds Like

The first week of term was always the worst.

Not because of the work, Elena was good at the work, had always been good at the work, found comfort in the clear lines of psychology theory and research methodology, the way problems had structures and structures had answers. It was the social architecture of the first week that gave her that uneasy feeling like knots twisting in her stomach : the expectation of newness, of enthusiasm, of presenting yourself to people who didn't know you yet as the version of yourself you wanted them to see.

Elena no longer had a version of herself she wanted people to see. She had a version she was protecting.

She sat in the back of her research methods seminar on Thursday morning and listened to Dr. Anand outline the dissertation expectations for final year students and tried not to think about Marcus.

She thought about Marcus.

He lives in her memory like a shadow at sunset long after the sun is gone.

She remembers the way he smiled when no one else was looking, how kindness could vanish from his face in an instant. Every argument ended with her apologizing for wounds she never caused. Every tear became evidence against her.

The memory comes like a flash: her sitting quietly, rehearsing explanations for feelings she had every right to feel.

Back then, she called it love.

Now she knows it was just her soul trying desperately to keep the peace

Not the worst things he had said, and with what she now understood was deliberate precision, made her world smaller and smaller until she was the only person in it who could hear herself speak.

And then he had left. Walked out at the end of second year, told her she was "too much work," and started dating someone in his seminar group by the following Monday.

The worst part was that she'd told no one, not even Priya,that her first feeling, when he left, had been relief.

And then the shame of the relief. And then the long, disorienting work of figuring out who she was when no one was watching her every move and cataloguing her failures.

She was still figuring it out.

Dr. Anand dismissed them at ten. Elena packed her bag, took the east path back to Oakhurst, made herself a sandwich she ate at the window, and opened her dissertation notes.

At four o'clock, someone knocked on her door.

She knew it was Liam before she opened it, there was something distinctive about his knock, an energy to it that was already becoming recognisable, three knocks in quick succession followed by one slower one, like punctuation.

He was holding a pot.

"I made soup," he said. "There's too much of it. Do you want some?"

Elena looked at the pot. It was a large pot. Whatever was in it smelled like garlic and thyme and something that might have been lemon.

"You made soup," she said.

"I cook when I'm stressed. First week anxiety. I made approximately one litre of chicken soup and I live alone." He paused. "It's good soup.

There was something about how open he was and how easily he admitted he was anxious . It was so different from what she was used to from strangers that, for a moment, she didn't know how to respond.

"Why are you stressed?" she asked. The question came out before she'd decided to ask it.

He leaned slightly against the doorframe. "I transferred here from another university. I know people don't really talk about that but it's a bit like being new in ways that the second and third years aren't, even though technically I'm also a third year. I'm not sure yet if I made the right choice."

Elena looked at him. He said this easily, but she had learned, in the long difficult months after Marcus, to listen to what lived underneath the easy things people said.

"Did you need to leave?" she asked. She wasn't sure why she kept asking him questions.

"Yeah," he said, simply. "I did."

A beat.

"I'll get a bowl," she said.

He looked surprised. Not unpleasantly more like someone who'd asked a question expecting a particular answer and had received a better one.

She got two bowls. He came in she moved aside, let him in, noted the mildly alarming nature of this and set it aside and he ladled the soup with the focus of someone who took soup seriously. They sat at her small kitchen table, not quite facing each other, and she ate, and the soup was good.

"You've got a lot of books," he said, looking at the shelves that lined the wall opposite.

"Psychology," she said. "Most of them."

"What draws you to it?"

She considered the honest answer. "Understanding why people behave the way they do," she said. "So I can make sense of things."

He nodded, and she braced herself for make sense of what? or like what kind of things? the follow-up questions that were really requests to excavate you, that preceded the taking of what they found.

He didn't ask.

"I like that answer," he said. And then, moving easily on: "I'm doing Environmental Science. Which sounds very noble but mostly right now it's a lot of statistics and I am not naturally a statistics person."

"What kind of person are you naturally?"

He really thought about it, which she hadn't expected. "A listen-and-then-act person," he said. "I like to understand a system before I try to change it. That's why the stats matter, I know. But my brain wants to skip to the action part."

Elena ate her soup. Outside, the autumn sun was moving low across the sky, throwing long amber shapes through the window.

"Thank you for the soup," she said when they'd finished.

"Thank you for the oat milk," he said. "We're even."

He collected the pot, rinsed both bowls in her sink without being asked, and went back to 4C.

Elena sat at her kitchen table for a while after he left.

The apartment felt, strangely, more full than usual. Not intrusively. Not the way it had felt full of Marcus — with his presence, his watchfulness, the constant monitoring of her words and expressions for what she might be doing wrong. Just full. Normally full, the way rooms were supposed to feel when people were in them.

She didn't know what to do with that.

She opened her dissertation notes and worked until eleven, and when she went to bed the wall between their apartments was quiet, and she fell asleep faster than she had in weeks.