Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 27: Public
The English department’s end-of-year faculty dinner was held in the second week of August in the private dining room of a restaurant downtown that had been used for the event for twenty years and which, consequently, had the particular institutional atmosphere of a room where the same group of people had sat making very similar conversation for a very long time.
Theo had attended this dinner every year since his hire. He had attended it alone, largely, or in the company of colleagues who were friends in the collegial sense without being people he particularly wanted to spend a Saturday evening with. He had attended it after Monica’s claim with the particular hypervisibility of a man who knows he is being watched and is performing normalcy under observation. He had attended it last year with the settled, somewhat exhausted calm of someone who has made his peace with a quieter life.
He arrived this year with Amara.
They were not late. They were, in fact, exactly on time, which was Amara’s doing — she had the punctuality of someone who had grown up in a household where being on time was a form of respect, and she had applied this to the faculty dinner with the same focused practicality she applied to everything. She was in a green dress that he had not seen before and which was, he felt, doing something to his ability to think about Victorian literature, which was technically his job.
He held the door.
She walked in, and the room did the thing rooms do when something new enters them — a slight recalibration, a collective readjusting of attention. Not everyone noticed immediately. But enough did.
He put his hand at the small of her back.
He introduced her to the department chair as his partner, which was the word they’d agreed on, which felt simultaneously entirely adequate and nowhere near sufficient for what she actually was. The chair shook her hand with the genuine warmth of a man who had a solid sense of the politics of the situation and had apparently decided which side of them he was on. His closest departmental colleague made a sound that could only be described as delighted.
Not everyone was warm.
There were two colleagues in the mid-section of the room who registered their arrival with the particular studied neutrality of people communicating disapproval without technically communicating anything, and one of the senior faculty whose interactions with him had always had a slightly competitive undercurrent made a comment about the TA program that was technically benign and not technically benign. Amara absorbed this with the complete composure of someone who had been in rooms that didn’t want her in them before and had not required the room’s permission to stay.
He respected that more than he could adequately express.
They found their seats. He poured her wine. She talked to the medievalist on her left with the engaged fluency of someone who is genuinely interested in what another person does, and he watched her do it and thought: *I am taking this person to Oxford in three weeks and she is extraordinary.*
Dean Wallace arrived late and found them at the table.
Theo stood. Amara stood. The mathematics of the moment were understood by everyone in the vicinity.
“Professor Lancaster,” Wallace said. She looked at Amara. “Dr. — candidate Hassan. I understand you’re taking the Oxford fellowship.”
“I am,” Amara said. “Beginning September.”
“Exceptional opportunity.” She held Amara’s eyes with the direct appraisal she gave to everything. “Congratulations.” She looked at Theo. “I’ve approved your sabbatical application. The terms are in the paperwork from the department.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll be in Oxford.”
“I’ve received an appointment as visiting scholar through the English Faculty. Yes.”
A pause. The table around them was listening with the slightly elaborated casualness of people who have found a reason to study their menus.
“She’s no longer your student?” Wallace asked.
“She has not been my student or my TA for four months.” He held the dean’s eyes. “She’s my equal. And my girlfriend.”
It was the word he’d agreed on. He found, in the saying of it, that it was not quite the right word — it was accurate but insufficient, like calling a cathedral a building. He made a mental note to revisit the terminology.
Wallace looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at Amara. Then she nodded, once, with the characteristic precision of a woman who made decisions and stood by them.
“Enjoy Oxford,” she said. She moved on.
The table exhaled collectively.
The colleague who had made the TA comment was looking at his plate with the expression of a man who has recalibrated. The chair was saying something to his wife. The medievalist had resumed her conversation with Amara, who had not, Theo noted, appeared to have suspended it at any point during the Wallace exchange.
“You handled that beautifully,” he said, low, in the brief moment when the conversation around them moved elsewhere.
“I didn’t do anything. You did.”
“We did.” He reached for her hand under the table. She let him take it. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She said it with the quiet certainty that was one of the things he loved most about her — not the performance of being fine, the actual thing. “Let them talk.”
“They will.”
“I know.” She looked at him across the candlelit table with the dark eyes that he had been cataloging since October, that he still found new things in. “As long as I have you.”
“You have me.”
“Then I’m fine.” She squeezed his hand. “Also your colleague is staring.”
“Which one?”
“The one who made the comment.”
He looked. His colleague looked away.
“Good,” he said.
She pressed her lips together to contain something. He had learned to read that expression. It was the one that meant she was finding something funnier than she was prepared to admit, which was one of his favorite of all her expressions, and he filed it and continued with his wine.
Dinner went on. The conversations shifted and reformed in the usual faculty-dinner patterns. At ten o’clock they said their goodbyes and walked out into the August night, which was warm and smelled of summer, and she took his arm on the sidewalk and they walked without particular destination for a while.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
He thought about it. “Like a person who has stopped pretending,” he said.
“Was it as bad as you expected?”
“It was worse in some ways and better in others.” He paused. “The better parts were substantially better.”
“The dean.”
“The dean. And the chair. And everyone who looked at you talking and understood immediately that they were looking at someone exceptional.” He said it plainly, without embarrassment. He had learned, mostly, to say what he meant. “The worse parts were — predictable. And manageable.”
“By whom?”
“By us.” He said it with the simple finality of a man who has arrived at a truth and is done arguing about it. “We manage things together. That’s how it works now.”
She tilted her head back and looked at the sky, which was the dark urban kind, orange-lit and starless, and she smiled at it with the particular unguarded smile she gave to things she found genuinely pleasing.
“Together,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“I know you do.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “We leave for Oxford in three weeks.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never done anything like this.”
“Sabbatical?”
“This.” He gestured, slightly helplessly, at what he meant: the dinner, her arm in his, the summer night, the being public, the going together. “Any of this.”
“Neither have I.” She leaned against him slightly as they walked. “I think that’s all right.”
“Yes,” he said.
He thought it was all right.
He was fairly certain, in fact, that it was the most all right he’d been in a very long time.
They walked on into the August night, not hurrying, because they had time now — the particular luxury of two people who have stopped rationing the moments they spend together — and the city moved around them and nothing required hiding and the whole thing felt, quite simply, like the beginning.
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