Page 37

“I was a boxer. Past life. But now, being a step ahead of everyone gets tiresome. I just want to be able to take things at face value, to stop looking for the real meaning hidden beneath every word and every look.”

“And nobody ever just gets to be a hello.”

“No.”

“Not even me, right now?”

A small flare of something in his face. “Especially not you.”

The way he says it brings the heat up along my collarbone and under my jaw, and I’m not sure whether it was meant to or whether he’s as caught off-guard by it as I am. The lamplight blurs at the edges of my vision. I let out the breath that I was holding and now I know he notices that too.

He clears his throat and looks away. The pencil gets picked up and set back down. Then he pulls one of the books on the table toward him and opens it in the middle without looking at the page. Neither of us speak.

My eye falls on a slim bound monograph on the far side of the table, half-covered by one of the open books. The visible part of the cover reads “—ral Memory in the Reading of Bone,” and below that, two names in smaller type: S. Vale & R. Marlowe.

I reach for it without thinking. The thing is, I’d known he’d written some papers and I’d always wanted to read them. I just didn’t know if or when I’d come across one.

His head comes up when I take it in my hands but he doesn’t say anything. A look comes across his face, jaw tightening, nostrils flaring once.

“This is yours,” I say, careful. “You wrote this paper.”

He nods, his posture stiff.

“Who’s Marlowe?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer immediately. He’s staring at the paper.

“Roen Marlowe,” he says, finally, his voice low. “He was my student. He assisted me on the methodology.”

“And now?”

“He isn’t at the Mortis anymore.”

I know that this is the name of the man I saw screaming soundlessly in the dark. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. The iron taste I’d had in my mouth on Monday rises faintly again at the back of my tongue, and the feel of the monograph in my hand is suddenly heavier than a thirty-page paper should hold. I set it down.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He nods, once, very slightly and we lapse into a silence that feels more potent than the one before. Eventually he reaches across and shifts a stack of books an inch to the left and I know the gesture signifies that the moment is over.

“The formal dinner is on the fourteenth next month,” he eventually says, like we’re back to making conversation. Small talk.

“I’d heard.”

“I’ll be there.” A beat. His eyes dart to mine. “I’m not⁠—”

“You’re not what?”

“I’m not inviting you.” He says it quickly. Too quickly. His neck flushes above his collar and I delight in it. “I only mean, I’m telling you. That I’ll be there. Not as an invitation. Faculty are required to attend. All faculty. There’ll be…most of us. There.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. I’d been expecting a lot of things from this conversation but the sight of Professor Sebastian Vale, bone-reader, veil-sensing instructor, man who I’ve heard makes students cry just by standing too close, going red at the collarbones because he’d said something that could’ve been mistaken for a date, had not been on the list.

“I will make a note of that,” I say, with as much gravity as I can produce.

A smile flits across his mouth, so fast I could have imagined it.

My god, he’s handsome.

“I’ll stop talking now,” he says.