Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 15: The problem is me
The week after the investigation closed was a strange one.
Amara sat in it and tried to take its temperature. He had left the door open. He had apologized, which was a word she suspected he used sparingly and meant carefully. He had looked at her with the full, unguarded attention he usually reserved for particularly difficult passages of Victorian poetry, and something about that look had unlocked something in her chest that she’d been keeping very carefully shut.
She was fine. She was fine in the deliberate, cultivated way she’d been fine for months — through the cold shoulder and the closed door and the investigation and the five days of being asked professional questions about a professional relationship while the interviewer looked for the seams in her composure. She had not found any seams to find. She was very good at composure.
She was also extremely, comprehensively tired of it.
Tuesday afternoon, the anteroom door was open. She was working through the last of the midterm revisions and he was at his desk and they had exchanged two professional sentences at nine in the morning and nothing since. Outside, March had arrived with a kind of energetic cold — bright and sharp, the early suggestion of something warmer underneath. She could see a wedge of sky through his office window from where she sat, and it was the clear electric blue of an approaching spring.
“Maybe I should step down,” she said.
The sounds from his office stopped. She had not planned to say it out loud. She had been thinking it, turning it over since the investigation — the practical calculus of whether her presence in this position was causing more problems than it solved, whether the cleanest thing would be to extract herself and give both of them a clean professional separation. She had turned it over and set it aside and it had kept returning.
She heard him stand.
He appeared in the doorway. Not leaning — standing, squarely, his hands in his pockets.
“No,” he said.
“It would resolve—”
“You’re excellent at this job. The students rely on you. Stepping down because of a baseless complaint from a resentful student would be—” he stopped, reordered. “Don’t let rumors—”
“I’m not concerned about rumors,” she said. “I’m concerned about your position. If my presence here is creating problems for you—”
“You’re not the problem.”
“What does that mean?”
He looked at her. The long, full look — the one she didn’t know what to do with, the one that seemed to be weighing something it wasn’t allowed to say.
“It means—” he began.
He stopped.
She waited. She was very good at waiting. She had been waiting since October, waiting with the particular patient tension of a person who understands that some things cannot be rushed — that timing matters, that circumstances matter, that the ethics are real even when they’re inconvenient, even when every other part of your life is pointing in a different direction.
But sitting here in the March light with four months of accumulated almost behind them, with the investigation and the cold shoulder and the book left silently on her desk and the eight handwritten pages of mentorship notes that said *I see you, I see your work, I take you seriously as an equal* — sitting here with all of that, she found that she had fewer words than she usually did.
“What does it mean?” she asked again.
He looked away. Out the window, at the electric blue sky, at the courtyard below where students crossed in pairs and groups with the lightened energy of a winter that was finally loosening its grip.
“It means that I have not managed this well,” he said, finally. “That my response to — to a situation I should have addressed differently — has been to use distance as a substitute for judgment, and that you have done nothing wrong and have had to manage the consequences of my failures. That’s not acceptable.”
She looked at him. “What situation?”
He looked at her.
She looked back.
“The situation,” he said, very carefully, “in which I am your supervisor and we are in a professional relationship and those facts are the only things that apply here.”
It was not an answer. It was a wall, assembled in real time, and she understood what it was made of. She understood it the way she’d understood it since October — not as cruelty but as fear, not as dismissal but as self-protection.
She nodded. Looked back at her papers.
“I’m not stepping down,” she said. “The work matters to me and the students matter to me and I’m not leaving because things got uncomfortable.”
“Good.” He paused. “That’s — good.”
“But I’d appreciate the one-on-ones being reinstated. The email-only approach is inefficient for both of us.”
A beat. Then: “Thursday at four.”
“Fine.”
He went back into his office. She turned back to her papers. The door between them stayed open, and the afternoon light was gold and unhurried, and she worked for two more hours in the quiet of his presence, and at six o’clock she packed her bag and said good night and he said good night and she walked home in the blue March evening thinking:
*Three weeks.*
Not enough and exactly enough and somehow, stubbornly, sufficient.
She called her mother that evening, which she did every Tuesday. Her mother asked about her work, her research, whether she was eating properly. Amara answered all of these questions and then her mother said, in the way that only mothers can say things, “Something’s different with you today.”
“I’m fine, hooyo.”
“You’re fine in the voice that means you’re holding something.”
She smiled at the phone. “Maybe.”
“Is it a person?”
“It’s—” she sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“The best ones always are.” Her mother’s voice was warm and entirely unsurprised. “What kind of complicated?”
“The kind that has a timeline,” Amara said. “It’ll be clearer in three weeks.”
“Three weeks. Okay.” Her mother paused. “He treats you well?”
“He treats me—” she thought about it. “He treats me like I’m serious. Like my thinking matters. Like I’m worth paying attention to.”
A silence from the other end, and then her mother said something soft in Somali that Amara had heard throughout her childhood — a phrase that roughly translated to *the thing that sees you clearly is the thing worth keeping.*
“Don’t let the complicated scare you,” her mother said.
“I’m not scared,” Amara said. “I’m patient.”
“Those are sometimes the same thing.”
She laughed, really laughed, and they talked for another half hour about other things. And when she hung up she lay back on her couch and looked at the ceiling and thought about a man who had said *you’re not the problem* and meant it — who carried the weight of every failure like it was permanent, who had looked at her from a doorway with something in his face he couldn’t quite call by its name.
Three weeks.
She could be patient for three more weeks.
She was going to hold him to it.
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