Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 13: Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day fell on a Thursday.
Amara had not given this much thought until she walked into the seminar room for their Victorian Literature class and found it decorated — by whom she couldn’t determine, but decorated nonetheless, someone having taped small paper hearts to the whiteboard and left a box of chocolates on the front table with a card that said *From a secret admirer* in handwriting she recognized as belonging to a sophomore named Jake who had been bringing Theo’s TA offerings of excessive helpfulness since week three.
She removed the hearts from the whiteboard before class started. She put the chocolates on the side table where anyone who wanted one could take one. She did this efficiently and without particular emotion and told herself that Valentine’s Day was an entirely arbitrary calendrical construction that she had no opinion about.
The lecture was on Victorian love poetry.
Of course it was.
She sat in her usual seat and watched him teach Coventry Patmore and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Rossetti siblings, and the undergraduates in the class — who were, after all, mostly twenty-year-olds and therefore extremely invested in the subject matter even under the guise of literary analysis — were unusually engaged. A girl in the second row had her chin in her hand, looking at Theo with an expression of wistful contemplation that Amara recognized as the expression of someone who is hearing words that seem to be specifically about their own life.
“Do you believe in love, Professor Lancaster?” someone called out.
The room snickered. Theo stopped. He turned from the whiteboard with the measured precision of a man deciding in real time whether to deflect, dismiss, or engage.
He paused for longer than she would have expected.
“I believe in the *idea* of love,” he said, finally. “Reality is more complicated.”
He said it looking at the middle distance, somewhere between the board and the back wall. But she felt — with the particular acuity she had developed over months of watching him — the slight directional pull of his attention. The way the sentence was pointed somewhere even if his eyes weren’t.
She looked at her notebook.
The lecture ended. Students streamed out in the usual Valentine’s Day energy — the ones with plans disappearing quickly, the ones without dragging their feet and discussing where they were going for dinner anyway, together, as a consolation. Theo was answering questions at the front. She gathered her things slowly, and somehow the room emptied before she meant it to, and then it was only the two of them and the residual warmth of a room that had held a hundred people, and the paper hearts she’d taken off the board and left in a small pile on the side table.
“Do you really not believe in love?” she asked.
It came out more plainly than she’d intended. Not aggressive, not provocative — just a genuine question, the kind you ask because you actually want to know the answer.
He turned. He looked at her with the expression she had been seeing more of lately — the one that was not quite the professional mask, that had started to come unguarded at the edges when he wasn’t paying close enough attention to his own defenses.
“I believe in impossible love,” he said. “The kind that can’t happen.”
She looked at him for a moment. The kind that can’t happen. Phrased in the present tense, as if they were presently in it, as if he were naming something current rather than historical.
“Why can’t it?” she said.
“Timing.” He turned back to his notes. “Circumstance. Ethics.”
“What if timing changed?”
A pause. Long and weighted. She watched the back of his shoulders and the set of his jaw and the careful controlled stillness of a man who was holding something very tightly.
“It hasn’t,” he said.
*Yet,* she thought.
She said it quietly, inside herself. She didn’t say it aloud. She picked up her bag and walked past him to the door, and she was almost through it when he spoke.
“Amara.”
She stopped. Her hand on the doorframe. He had used her first name exactly once before, in the elevator in Boston, and it had the same quality now — something breaking through the surface, something that couldn’t help itself.
She turned.
He was looking at her with the unguarded expression — the one that cost him something. The one she was beginning to understand was the truest version of his face.
“The paper,” he said. “I received the feedback notes I sent. I hope they were—”
“They were extraordinary,” she said. “Thank you.”
He nodded. Looked at his desk.
She waited for one breath, two. Then she left.
She went home and sat at her kitchen table and put her hands flat against the wood surface and breathed.
The envelope had come three days ago. She had opened it and found eight dense, careful pages in his handwriting — not typed, handwritten, with the precision of someone who had been trained in an era when handwriting mattered — and the last line had been *This is exceptional work. Well done.* And she had read the eight pages once, and then again, and then a third time with her coffee going cold beside her, and she had understood from the engagement of it, from the depth of it, from the particular quality of intellectual care it contained, that he was not treating her as a student he was supervising.
He was treating her as a peer.
She had allowed herself, alone in her apartment at seven in the morning with the early February light coming through the window, to feel that. To feel what it meant and what it cost him to send it. She had allowed herself six minutes of it before she put the pages carefully back in the envelope and went to shower and went to her office and did her work and did not think about it.
She was thinking about it now.
*Timing. Circumstance. Ethics.*
She pulled her phone out and texted Yara: *He said “impossible love” in a lecture on Victorian poetry and then said my name.*
Yara responded immediately with a string of characters that communicated, without any room for misinterpretation, that she found this development significant.
Then: *How long.*
Amara did the math. *Six weeks.*
*You can do six weeks standing on your head.*
She looked at the phone for a long moment. Then she typed: *I know.* Then she added: *It’s just the standing on my head part that’s getting harder.*
She set the phone down and looked at the ceiling and thought about a man who believed in the idea of love, not the reality, because the reality had done something to him he was still recovering from, who sent eight handwritten pages of mentorship notes because he was not capable of doing anything halfway, who said *impossible* and meant *not yet.*
Six weeks.
She got up and made fresh coffee and pulled out her thesis chapter and worked until midnight, and she was fine, genuinely fine, in the steady purposeful way she had always been fine.
She was also counting.
Six weeks.
She had gotten this far. She could get further.
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