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I don’t know what to say. I pull out the mail and rifle through it. My box has the electric bill, a flyer for the smoothie place, and a cream envelope with the university seal on the flap. My phone buzzes against my hip while I’m still holding the little door open.

I pull it out. You have received a deposit.

I thumb the notification, because I’m not expecting a deposit right now. FAIRHAVEN UNIVERSITY PAYROLL.

I put the phone back in my pocket. I put the envelope under the electric bill. Neither of those things is getting dealt with in gravel.

“You good?” Ghost says, hesitating before stepping off the cement.

I blink at him, because I must have forgotten he was there while my stomach was sinking.

“Fine.” It comes out smoothly. “You?”

“Yup.” He shuts his box and pockets his key and nods at me. “See you around, Professor.”

I watch him go up the row, and I’d bet the contents of this deposit that Ghost has just lied to me, and that he knows for a fact that I’ve just lied to him, too. Neither of us is going to mention it. There is a grammar to this place and nobody had to teach it to me.

The trailer is warm when I get back. I proposed turning off the heat during the day. Levi absolutely would not hear of it.

I look over the living room for traces of him. There’s a cup in the sink. His psychology text is facedown on the arm of the couch, spine cracked, the way he leaves every book he loves. He’s taken my book to school with him, probably just to brag about it.

I sit at the dining table and take the phone out first, because the phone is smaller, and click into my bank account.

The deposit amount is wrong. And then I realize that the date is wrong, too.

This university pays a month behind, the way most of them do. Work you do in September lands in the middle of October. I have complained about it at faculty lunches like a man complaining about weather, and it has never mattered to me until right now, because the money would be coming.

It’s the twenty-fourth. September’s money came in on the fifteenth, the way it always does, and October’s isn’t due until the middle of November. And this isn’t a month’s pay, because my pay is a whole number I could recite in my sleep. This is a fraction of it, prorated through my last day of work.

I work it through twice, hoping for something different the second time. Payroll does not prorate a suspension. A suspension is a pause and a pause has no end date in it — the money either stops or it doesn’t. What payroll prorates is a separation.

Somebody opened a record and put a last day in a box, and the system did what systems do, and it did it a cycle ago, because payroll always runs a cycle ahead.

C’est fait. It was done two weeks ago by a person who then went to lunch.

You do not cut a man his final check while you are still deciding what to do about him.

The cream envelope is still under the electric bill. I open it with my thumb because I can’t find the letter opener and I’m not going to look for it.

Dear Dr. Saint-Jacques,

This is a paper copy of the email sent to you last Monday, to which you have not yet responded. The Ethics Committee will hear your case on Wednesday, November 4th at 10 AM in the conference room in Grier 412. There, the committee will hear the terms of your suspension and decide whether or not further steps should be taken. We appreciate your cooperation in this meeting. Until that time, you will not be allowed to return to the campus. This will be a closed meeting. Family and friends should be strongly discouraged from attending.

Yours sincerely,

Rachel Pratchett, PhD

Committee Chair

To which you have not yet responded. So that goes in as well. Before anybody has convened anything, my silence is on the file in the chair’s own handwriting, and it is my fault that they had to spend a stamp.

We appreciate your cooperation in this meeting. I have not offered any. She is thanking me in advance for a thing I have not agreed to do, which is the politest way I have ever been told to sit down and be quiet while they make official what today’s check just made clear.

And then: Family and friends should be strongly discouraged from attending.

Not prohibited. Discouraged. Strongly. If I brought him anyway nobody would stop me and everybody would remember. I read it four times and each time I hear Levi saying I’ll always have your six, and by the fourth I have folded the paper down to the size of a playing card without deciding to.

So the committee will convene. Five people will sit in a room and weigh the matter gravely and arrive at a conclusion a clerk in payroll was already informed of today.