Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 24: Oxford
The email came on a Tuesday morning in July, and Amara read it twice before she called Yara.
“Oxford offered me the fellowship,” she said.
Yara was quiet for a moment, and then she said: “Amara.”
“I know.”
“That’s—”
“I know.”
“That’s the postdoctoral fellowship at the Bodleian. The one you applied for two years ago as a reach and didn’t get. The one that essentially—”
“I know what it is.” She sat down at her kitchen table. The email was still open on her laptop, the official Oxford letterhead, the offer of a one-year research fellowship beginning in September, funded, fully equipped with library access and a stipend and a cohort of other early-career scholars from around the world. It was the career-making kind of thing, the kind that put you on a tenure-track trajectory two years earlier than the alternatives.
It was also in England.
For a year.
Three months into dating a man she was in love with, after nine months of waiting to be allowed to love him at all.
She did not go directly to his apartment. She sat with the email for two hours first, turning the thing over, looking at it from all the angles. She thought about what a year at Oxford could mean for her research. She thought about the cohort, the library, the doors that kind of fellowship opened. She thought about the version of herself that had applied two years ago, hungry and focused and entirely uncomplicated in her ambitions, and what that person would say to the current version sitting at a kitchen table feeling the specific collision of two enormous things.
She went to him at seven that evening.
He was at his desk, working on the book chapter, wearing reading glasses that he only wore when he was alone — he had explained once, with the characteristic self-awareness of a proud man acknowledging his own vanity, that he needed them for sustained close reading and found them undignified. She had disagreed. She still disagreed. She filed this away for later.
She held up her phone with the email open.
He took it. He read it. He set the phone down carefully on the desk.
“Oxford,” he said.
“A one-year postdoctoral fellowship. Beginning September.”
“I know what a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford means.” He looked at her. “You have to take it.”
She had anticipated this, in the abstract way you anticipate things you know are coming. She had still not prepared a response for it.
“It’s Oxford,” she said. “It’s England. It’s—”
“A career-defining opportunity that you have been working toward for years. Yes.” He stood. “You have to take it.”
“We just—” she stopped. Started again. “The timing is—”
“Timing has not been our strength from the beginning,” he said. “We are, apparently, people who do things when they can be done and wait when they can’t.” He crossed the room. He put his hands on her shoulders, carefully, with the focused attention of someone who is choosing his next words with the same care he’d choose an argument. “Taking this fellowship is not leaving me. It’s taking the next step in the work you’ve been building your whole life. Those are not in conflict.”
“They feel like they’re in conflict.”
“Because we just got here.” He touched her face. “I know. I feel it too.”
“Then—”
“Long distance for a year.” He said it with the quiet certainty of a man who has thought this through. “We can do it. Video calls, flights over the holidays. I have sabbatical credit I’ve been carrying for two years. We figure it out.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“It won’t be easy. But it’s one year.” He looked at her. “And the alternative is you staying here and building resentment over a decision you didn’t make, and I won’t have that. I won’t be the reason you didn’t take Oxford.”
“What if I’d rather be here? With you?”
“Then you make that choice for yourself, with full information.” He pressed his forehead against hers, the gesture she had come to know as his version of a language he hadn’t yet found other words for. “But don’t make it because you’re afraid I can’t handle you going.”
“Can you?”
A pause. Honest, rather than reassuring. “No,” he said. “I won’t like it. I will miss you in very specific and probably embarrassing ways that I am not going to enumerate right now because you don’t need that information while you’re trying to make a decision.” He pulled back enough to look at her. “But I will handle it. Because the alternative — you not going — is not something I’m willing to be responsible for.”
She looked at him.
“Love that holds you back isn’t love,” he said. “It’s just another kind of cage.”
She thought about Jane Eyre. About women who chose smallness out of love, who made themselves fit into the spaces that were available rather than the spaces they were meant for. She thought about her mother, who had made a different kind of choice — had come to a new country and built something real and never, in all of Amara’s twenty-five years, suggested that ambition and love were mutually exclusive.
“It’s a year,” she said.
“It’s a year,” he agreed.
“And you’ll—”
“I will be here. I will call you every day if you want me to. I will be exactly here when you come back.”
She pressed her forehead against his chest. His arms came around her. They stood in his study with the summer evening coming through the windows and the email open on the desk and the enormous, complicated rightness of a man who loved her enough to send her away.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” he said. Into her hair. “Go to Oxford. Come back extraordinary.”
She would have laughed, but she was somewhat occupied.
“I’m already extraordinary,” she said.
She felt him smile. “I know,” he said. “Go be it in England for a year.”
She was going to miss him in ways she wasn’t ready to think about yet.
She was also, underneath the missing, going to Oxford.
Both things were true.
She held him tighter and let both things be true, and thought about September, and the Bodleian, and a year that felt impossibly large and — just possibly — not large enough to hold everything it was going to contain.
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