Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 10: Thin ice
The call came on a Tuesday morning in February, between his nine o’clock office hour and a faculty meeting he’d been planning to be five minutes late to.
*Professor Lancaster. Dean Wallace would like to see you this afternoon at three.*
He’d known, even before he sat down across from Patricia Wallace in her corner office with its view of the main courtyard and its wall of framed certificates and its careful arrangement of furniture designed to remind visitors that she was in charge of the room, what it was going to be about. He’d known the way you know sometimes when a storm is coming — from the quality of the air, from some barometric change in the atmosphere around you.
He sat down.
Dean Wallace was a woman in her mid-fifties who had the particular bearing of someone who had spent decades navigating institutional politics without either losing herself to them or being destroyed by them — which was a more difficult achievement than most people understood. She had a reputation for being fair and a reputation for being inflexible, which were not contradictions. She folded her hands on her desk and looked at him with the measured expression of a person who has already decided what they are going to say and is organizing its delivery.
“I’ve heard rumors,” she said.
He kept his face neutral. “What kind of rumors?”
“The kind that concern me. You and your TA.” She said it plainly, without embellishment, which was her way — she dealt in facts, or what she understood to be facts. “A few people have mentioned behavior they found… noteworthy. At the Harwick conference in December.”
He thought about the bar. The conversation. The elevator. The fact that neither of them had touched or said anything they shouldn’t have and the further fact that three months of working in close proximity to Amara Hassan had apparently been visible to people who were looking for it.
“There’s nothing,” he said.
“I’m glad to hear it.” She held his eyes. “You’re already on thin ice from Monica’s accusations.”
“Those were false—”
“I know they were false. The investigation found no evidence because there was no evidence. But I also know, and you know, that an accusation doesn’t have to be true to cause damage. The paper trail exists.” She paused. “One more whisper of impropriety and you will not be teaching here next semester. That is not a threat. That is the reality of your situation and I would be doing you a disservice not to be honest about it.”
He said nothing.
“She’s brilliant, from what I’ve seen,” Wallace said, and the pivot was deliberate — she was telling him she had looked, that she had assessed the situation with the full information available to her. “The best TA in the department this year, by any metric. I understand why you’d value her professionally. I understand the proximity.” She paused. “That’s exactly why I’m telling you this now, rather than after something happens.”
“Nothing is going to happen.”
“Good. Keep it that way.” She stood, which was the signal that the meeting was over. “Theodore. You built something real here. Your work matters to this department and to the field. Don’t lose it.”
He stood.
“Understood,” he said.
He walked out into the corridor and stood for a moment in the institutional quiet — the distant sound of typewriters from the admin office, someone’s printer going down the hall — and felt the cold settle into his chest. Not fear, exactly. More like the particular quality of a door closing, the sound of it final and definitive.
Wallace was right. She was almost always right, which was how she’d held that office for twenty-two years. He knew what he stood to lose — his position, his research, the life he’d constructed in the aftermath of Monica’s claim, the reputation he’d worked for twelve years to build. He knew what another investigation would do to him, whether or not there was anything to find.
He also knew, with a clarity that was somewhat terrible, that the past four months had been the most alive he’d felt in three years.
He knew both of these things simultaneously and he chose. He chose the way he’d chosen before, after Monica, when he’d understood that desire was not the same as wisdom and that the parts of himself that wanted things were not always the parts that knew what was good for him.
He would pull back. He would be what he should have been from the beginning: professional, appropriate, a supervisor doing his job and nothing more.
He walked back to his office.
Amara was in the anteroom, working at her desk in the afternoon light, her pen moving over a student paper, a small vertical line between her brows that he had learned meant she was reading something she disagreed with and was formulating her counter. She didn’t look up when he came in.
“Miss Hassan,” he said.
She looked up.
He could tell from her face that she heard something different in his voice — some change in register, some shift in the temperature. She was very perceptive. She had been perceptive since the first day, reading him with the same precision she brought to reading texts.
“Professor Lancaster,” she said.
He nodded once, said nothing more, and went into his office and closed the door.
He sat at his desk. He opened his laptop. He stared at a half-written paragraph of research for ten minutes without reading a word of it.
Then he opened his email and began composing a message to a colleague at another institution, an entirely routine piece of professional correspondence, and he typed with deliberate focus and he did not look toward the closed door and he did not think about the expression on her face when he’d walked past her without the usual exchange, the slight quickening of attentiveness that he’d registered before he’d managed to make himself not register it.
He thought: *this is necessary.*
He thought: *this is the right thing.*
He graded until nine. She left at six without saying goodbye, which was a first, and he heard the anteroom door close and the footsteps retreat and he sat in the silence they left behind and told himself it was fine. That this was how it needed to be. That he had made the right choice.
His office felt, in the hours that followed, significantly emptier than its dimensions warranted.
He was very good at choosing the right thing.
He just hadn’t realized how much it would cost.
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