The Forbidden Professor

Chapter 6

I went the next morning before my first class.

I'd been meaning to go since the first day.

Since I'd walked through those iron gates and stood on the main path looking at the stone buildings and felt nothing except the August heat.

I'd told myself I was waiting until I was settled.

Until I knew the campus well enough to find the right office without looking like I was lost.

The truth was I'd been putting it off because I already knew, in some quiet part of myself, what the answer was likely to be.

The administrative office was in the main building, ground floor, a long counter with two staff members. I waited behind a boy asking about a course transfer and when he was done I stepped up to the counter.

The woman on the other side had the patient, practiced expression of someone who had answered every possible version of every possible question and would answer them all again without complaint.

At least, not until the work day was over.

"Hi." I set my bag down. "I'm trying to find out if someone was affiliated with the university. An alumni or faculty. I'm not sure which. His name is Richard Beaumont."

She typed something.

Waited.

Typed something else.

The pause was long enough that I felt it in my chest. That suspension of breath that happened when you were waiting for something you needed and weren't sure you were going to get.

She looked up.

"I'm not finding any record of a Richard Beaumont. No student enrollment, no faculty listing, no staff affiliation." She said it kindly. My stomach clenched. "Is it possible the spelling is different?"

"No," I shook my head. "That's the spelling."

She typed once more, a last check, and shook her head. "Nothing in our system. I'm sorry."

"Thank you," I said.

I picked up my bag.

I walked out.

~0~

I sat on a bench in the main courtyard for a long time.

Not crying.

I didn't cry about my father in places where people could see me.

I had learned that early. In the first weeks after he disappeared. When the grief was so large and so public and so many people wanted to be part of it, I had decided that the only thing I could control was who got to see it.

So I sat on the bench and looked at the courtyard. I watched the students moving through it on their way to their first classes of the morning and I let the quiet sit inside my chest.

I thought about a document hidden in a wall that had sent me here and a thread that had just led nowhere.

No record.

No enrollment. No faculty listing. No staff affiliation.

My father had a document that referenced this university and the university had never even heard of him.

I had come here with one thread.

And the thread had just gone cold.

I sat with that.

The courtyard filled and thinned and filled again as classes started and let out and the morning moved on around me.

I stayed on the bench because I didn't particularly want to go anywhere and didn't particularly know where to go.

"Hey, Sienna."

I looked up.

Nolan was standing a few feet away with his bag over one shoulder and a coffee in his hand, looking at me with an expression I hadn't seen on him before.

Not the easy warmth he usually carried. Something quieter than that. More careful.

"You missed our History lecture," he said.

I blinked. "What time is it?"

"After ten." He nodded at the bench. "Can I?"

I moved my bag.

He sat down beside me and looked at the courtyard the way I'd been looking at it. We sat there for a moment in the kind of quiet that would have been uncomfortable with most people but wasn't with him.

"I can’t believe I missed it," I said eventually.

"It's fine. You can borrow my notes." He turned his coffee cup slowly in his hands. "You okay?"

I thought about the way to answer that. The true answer and the manageable answer. The version of the truth that could be said out loud to someone I'd known for less than two weeks.

"I was looking for something," I said. "But it wasn't there."

He nodded slowly. Not pressing for more. Just receiving it.

He stayed silent for a while. A long while.

Then he spoke.

"My mom used to say—" He stopped. Started again. "She had this thing she said. That the not-knowing was the hardest part." He was looking at the courtyard, not at me. "That once you knew something, even if it was bad, you could put your feet on the ground. But the in-between—" He shook his head slightly. "The in-between was its own thing."

I looked at him.

He still wasn't looking at me, and there was something in his profile, in the set of his jaw, in the the way he was holding himself, that told me he wasn't talking about me. Or no longer just talking about me.

"She sounds like she was smart," I said carefully.

He kept looking in the distance.

"She was." His voice was even. Completely even. The way of someone who had practiced keeping it that way. "She died. Last year.."

The courtyard went on around us. Someone laughed somewhere across the path. A pigeon landed near the bench and immediately left.

"I'm sorry," I said.

He nodded. "Your something," he said. "The thing you were looking for." He glanced at me sideways. "Is it about someone?"

I looked at my hands in my lap.

"My father," I said. "He's been… gone two years. No — not gone, just—" I stopped. Started again. “I came here because I thought there might be an answer somewhere." I paused.

Nolan was quiet for a moment.

"Two years," he said.

"Two years."

He nodded again, slow, and looked back out at the courtyard.

We sat there for a long time after that. Not talking much. Not needing to.

Just two people who had been carrying the same specific weight and letting it exist between them without trying to fix it or explain it or make it into something smaller than it was.

Eventually he stood up, finished his coffee, and looked down at me.

"There's a place on the east side of campus," he said. "Good coffee, quiet, nobody really goes there until after noon." He tilted his head. "If you want to skip the rest of the morning."

I looked up at him.

I thought about the administrative office and the nothing in the system and the bench I'd been sitting on for over an hour.

"Yeah," I said.

I picked up my bag.

We walked.

~0~

We talked for two hours.

Not about everything…not the details, not the specifics of how each thing had happened or the full shape of what had been lost.

But the underneath of it.

The part that didn't have a clean story attached to it. The part that was just the weight of carrying something in every room you entered…of being in a place full of people moving through their lives and feeling the gap in yours like a physical thing.

He understood it without needing it explained.

I understood his without needing him to explain it.

That was the thing about grief, I was starting to think.

Not the grief that everyone saw…not the grief that had a funeral and a casserole and a week of people sitting in your living room telling you they were sorry.

The other kind.

The kind that just lived in you quietly and showed up in the way you held your coffee, the way you went still sometimes in the middle of a sentence. The way certain things caught you off guard on an otherwise ordinary Monday morning.

He had that kind.

So did I.

I walked back to the dorm in the early afternoon feeling lighter in a way I hadn't expected and couldn't entirely account for…not better, not fixed, just less alone in something I had been alone in for a very long time.

I was grateful for that.

I was also aware, somewhere underneath, that there was a different kind of feeling that had been following me around since my first class here.

That one had nothing to do with grief.

That one had everything to do with an office and a man who I shouldn’t know and shouldn’t want to know, but who had made me feel more excited about life and living than I’d felt in a long time.

I shouldn’t have felt that way…but I did.

And something inside me didn’t want to give that up.