The Black Hour Read Online Free Page A

him. Right. He probably thought I’d done something, too.
    “They’re all sorry it happened,” he said. “They just . . .” He glanced up at the girl in the frame as though she might jump into the conversation and save him.
    “What?”
    “They want to understand it.”
    I could see them. Clustering up around the coffee pots in the kitchenette. Pausing in front of their departmental mailboxes to compare junk mail. The ten minutes before faculty meetings, lingering over the dry dining service cookies. Exchanging glances, checking to see if someone among them had the story. What had I done? What did they have to do, or not do?
    Woo would have been in the thick of it.
    “Some of them,” Woo said to the girl in the frame. “They’re shitting their pants.”
    “Trotter,” I said.
    He smiled. “Yeah.”
    “Doyle?”
    His mouth dropped open. “But I thought—does Doyle date the students?”
    “So that’s the going theory? That I was screwing that kid?”
    Poor Woo. A fine researcher but a weak subject. He’d told me what I needed to know.
    “Maybe it’s better to let it go,” he said. “Get back to normal.”
    He looked so uncomfortable I turned to the girl in the painting. The problem with normal was that normal had been shot through. Normal wasn’t possible. Normal hadn’t even been that great. None of this would I admit, least of all to him.
    “Sure,” I said. “Normal.”

Woo made his excuses and slinked away.
    I was armed. My nerves steeled with pain-fighting medication, I knew now what I had only guessed before. Nothing had changed, but I felt more daring. More—to borrow a concept from Woo—myself. I fetched my bag from where Nathaniel had stowed it, wrestled my door closed, and took the elevator to the lobby. The front desk receptionist had arrived. She looked pointedly away.
    There were security cameras in the building now. I wondered how much of my triumphant return she’d seen. I punched the button for the automatic door with my cane. I needed coffee.
    Normal. I didn’t think they’d let me get back to it, and by they , I meant the faculty, the dean, the press. But I also meant the students. I meant the faces that turned to follow my progress as I tapped down the walkway and through the courtyard to the next building. I meant everyone.
    Outside it was so hot that I reconsidered my need for coffee. But once I stepped into the cool lobby of Smith Hall, up to the coffee hutch outside the dining room doors, and through the coffee server’s surveillance, once I felt the paper cup in my hand, I was steadier. Excited, actually. I was back. On campus, having coffee in Smith Hall, listening to the thunderous voices inside the dining hall where students talked around their cereal spoons and gained strength from their own cups. The first day of a new semester, everyone nattering and hopeful. I felt almost normal, almost like nothing had changed. Coffee in Smith before prepping for classes—that was something familiar, something the old Professor Amelia Emmet would have done. Corrine and I had come here three days a week for most of last fall. The two months I’d been here, anyway. I’d been here that last morning, as a matter of fact.
    Except you never knew when you faced the last of anything. That was a universal truth I wished I didn’t understand. That ridiculous curl on Doyle’s forehead came back to me.
    I chose a spot on a lobby bench by a sunlit window and sipped, wishing Corrine were here. I had a million questions for her. And I wanted to walk back into Dale Hall with someone by my side. Someone by my side who was on my side.
    There were so few options. Lying in a hospital bed for a few months was a precision tool for counting true friends. Cor visited all the time, kept me in contraband chocolate and gossip. But she was the only one. Even Doyle had only come by once.
    I could definitely remember things I didn’t want to, or I would have blocked out Doyle’s visit.
    That day, I