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She’s shorter than him. She uses the lectern, which he never did. She has a clicker and a set of slides that came with the textbook. She is a perfectly good teacher, who gets through forty minutes on operant conditioning without once looking at me. I take more notes than I have before, but not because she’s going over more stuff. It’s more because I want to impress Bastien when I get home.

Cecilia gets there late and slides in beside me. About halfway through she leans over. “Is he coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because everybody’s saying he got fired.”

“He didn’t.” I don’t look at her either.

She looks at me for a second longer than she needs to, and then goes back to her notes. I sit there and watch Molly teach my husband’s class and try not to blame her for the anger I’m feeling.

At the end she says, “Mr. Knight, could I see you for a minute?”

She waits for the room to empty out.

“How is he?” she asks when the door closes behind the last of them.

“He’s had a few rough days.”

She almost smiles. Then she takes a folder out of her bag and puts it on the lectern between us and opens it. She turns it around so it faces me.

It’s two pages. There’s a university crest on the top one and a lot of small type and a box near the bottom with two lines in it.

“This is the disclosure,” she says. “Relationship between an employee and a student where there is an instructional connection. You each declare it, I countersign as chair, it goes to HR, they put a management plan in place. I have agreed to oversee your grading. Which, as I have access to the course shell, makes sense.”

“In the handbook. It says pre-existing relationships aren’t prohibited.”

“It does say that.”

“So we didn’t need this.”

“You needed this. Past tense,” she says. “That’s what the clause means. It means you’re allowed, provided you tell us. It’s Title IX.” She looks at me over the top of her glasses. “Federal money comes with conditions attached. If this university is found to have handled a complaint badly — not a crime, Mr. Knight, a complaint, badly — that money can stop coming.”

“How much money?”

“Enough that nobody in this building will ever be asked whether it’s fair if they sacrifice one lowly professor to keep the taps turned on.” She closes the folder and opens it again. “When a person starts to look like a risk to it, they don’t get weighed. They get removed. It’s not personal, even if it feels like it should be.”

I put my signature on it, and when I go to put today’s date, she puts a Post-it on the form with a date from late August.

“Dr. Baker—”

“I’d rather you didn’t say anything about it out loud in this room.”

“He won’t agree to this. He’s an honest man.”

“Then make it clear to your husband what I’m risking to make this right. Make him sign the right goddamned date.”

I take the folder and hold it against my chest. “What happens if somebody asks where it’s been?”

“Then it will turn out that I misfiled it,” she says. “I’m fifty-eight years old and I have been misfiling things since the Obama administration. It’s practically a credential.”

She puts her bag on her shoulder.

“Levi.” It’s the first time she’s used my first name. “I’m not doing this because I like either of you very much at the moment. I’m actually pretty angry with both of you. I’m doing it because that form should have been in a drawer in September and the only reason it wasn’t is because this toxic work environment ensured that a frightened, vulnerable man couldn’t make himself walk twenty feet down the hallway and ask a question. That’s not a crime. It’s a shame it’s about to be treated like one.”

She collects her things and walks out without waiting for me to respond.

I have a break from classes and for the moment, I have nowhere to be. Bastien’s office door is closed. I go back to my studio on Constitution and look at it honestly. For a single man on his own, it was okay. For two people, it’s way too small. And, what’s more, it’s surrounded by students. I open the three cabinets and pull my meager belongings into boxes, strip the mattress, and make sure the bathroom is clean. After I’ve loaded them into the cab of my truck, I put up a notice at the Bean Stop that I’m intending to sublet my studio, buy a coffee, and scroll through the back pages of the Fairhaven Excelsior in the off chance there’s a place to rent that hasn’t been put on the Internet.