Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 22: The vetting
Theo had been evaluated by many formidable people over the course of his career. Thesis committees, peer reviewers, department chairs, a dean who had once told him that his book was the most significant contribution to Victorian scholarship in a decade and then two years later given him the thin-ice speech. He had sat in rooms with people who held his professional future in their hands and maintained his composure, answered their questions with precision, and come out the other side with his work intact.
He was, nonetheless, nervous about dinner with Yara Osman.
He had known about Yara for months — had assembled her from Amara’s references to her, from the occasional presence in the hallway or the courtyard when she came to find Amara after lectures. He knew she was Amara’s closest friend, her keeper of confidences, the person who had been hearing about him since before either of them had given the other person a name for what was happening. He knew that she was smart and direct and that she had told Amara, in the early weeks of the semester, that the hot brooding professor’s feelings would survive four months if they were real.
He appreciated this on principle and found it significantly more alarming in practice.
Amara had chosen the restaurant — neutral ground, a Korean barbecue place that she’d mentioned Yara loved, which told him something about her tactical thinking: give the interrogator terrain she’s comfortable in. He appreciated that too.
Yara arrived exactly on time, which he suspected was intentional, and he stood when she came to the table, which appeared to surprise her enough to pause her mid-approach. She was a tall woman with sharp eyes and the particular bearing of someone who had grown up in rooms where she had to be sharper than everyone else to be taken seriously, and she looked at him with the comprehensive assessment of someone who had already formed a version of him from months of secondhand reports and was now comparing it to the original.
She sat down.
“Professor Lancaster,” she said.
“Theo,” he said. “Please.”
“Theo.” She picked up the menu without looking at it — she already knew what she was ordering. “What are your intentions with my best friend?”
Amara made a sound. “Yara—”
“I’m asking. He can answer.”
He looked at Yara. She was looking back at him with the flat expectation of someone who has asked a question and intends to wait for the answer.
“To love her for as long as she’ll have me,” he said.
Yara looked at him for a long moment.
Then she looked at Amara.
Then back at him. “That’s a good answer.”
“I mean it.”
“I can tell.” She set her menu down. “She’s younger than you.”
“Twelve years. I’m aware.”
“Twelve years is—”
“She’s smarter than I am in at least four categories,” he said. “Kinder. Better organized. She has more intellectual range and more emotional intelligence, and she manages difficult situations with a grace that I am actively learning from. The twelve years are a fact. They don’t strike me as a relevant one.”
Another look. Longer this time. He sat under it and did not blink.
“Did you just say she’s smarter than you?” Yara asked.
“In at least four categories.”
“Which ones?”
“Empathy. Organizational capacity. Cross-disciplinary reach. The ability to read a room.” He paused. “I’m better at Victorian scholarship and apparently at risotto, on days when I’m paying attention.”
Yara turned to Amara. “Did you tell him to say that?”
“I told him nothing.” Amara looked amused and slightly pained. “I have no control over what comes out of his mouth.”
“Good answer,” Yara said, to him again. “The control thing was going to be my next question. Whether you’d try to manage her.”
“I would not try to manage her.” He said it with the quiet certainty of someone who had tried, in his marriage, and understood at a very granular level what that cost. “She’s not someone you manage. She’s someone you—” he stopped.
“Listen to?” Yara supplied.
“I was going to say follow. Sometimes. When she’s going somewhere worth following.”
Yara looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked up her menu properly, looked at it, set it down.
“Hurt her,” she said, pleasantly, “and I will destroy your academic reputation so efficiently that you won’t be able to get a tenure-track position at a community college.”
“Understood.”
“I have resources.” She was not entirely joking. “I know people at the Chronicle. I know people at the MLA. I know the editor of your publisher’s lead journal.”
“I believe you.”
“Good.” She reached for the water. “Now. Theo.” The name with the particular deliberateness of someone choosing to use it. “Tell me about the Scottish thing. Amara said there was a Scottish thing.”
The dinner lasted three hours. Yara Osman was, he discovered, a formidable conversationalist with an enormous range of reference and the kind of wit that operated so quickly you sometimes didn’t catch it until thirty seconds after she’d moved on to something else. She grilled him on his past — the marriage, without delicacy but also without cruelty — and received his honest answers with the same focused attention she gave to everything else. She told him about her own research, about her advisors, about the particular exhaustion of being a Black woman in a department that patted itself on the back for hiring her while expecting her to solve every diversity initiative simultaneously.
He found he liked her. Not in the careful, evaluating way of a man passing a test — genuinely liked her, with the simple recognition of a person who is very good at being themselves.
At the end of the evening, standing outside on the pavement while Amara was inside retrieving a forgotten cardigan, Yara turned to him.
“She read the draft,” she said.
He looked at her.
“She told me,” Yara said. “The deleted email. She told me the week she found it.” A pause. “She knew, from that point, that you were in the same place she was. And she still waited. She still came to work every day and held her office hours and managed that investigation and waited for you to get your act together, because she believed it was worth waiting for.”
He was quiet.
“Don’t make her do that again,” Yara said. “The waiting part was fine — the timing was what it was. But she has a capacity for patience that you should not mistake for inexhaustibility. She waited because she chose to. Make sure she never has to choose to do it again.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“I know you won’t.” She looked at the restaurant door. “She’s coming. Be good to her.”
Amara came out with her cardigan and looked between the two of them. “What are you two talking about?”
“Your risotto anecdote,” Yara said. “The B+ thing is genuinely my favorite thing about both of you.”
He met Amara’s eyes over Yara’s shoulder and something passed between them — the easy, intimate shorthand of two people who have started to develop a private language — and he thought: *I am going to be very good to her.*
He thought it with the certainty of someone who knows what they mean.
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