Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 6: November
There were things Theo allowed himself and things he didn’t, and he had always been very clear about where the lines were.
He allowed himself to look forward to Thursday mornings because Thursday was when he taught the smaller seminar section, which was where the real thinking happened — twenty students instead of a hundred and forty-eight, close enough to have an actual argument, and Amara sitting at the seminar table with her notebook open and her pen moving and her eyes tracking everything. He allowed himself to enjoy her contributions to those seminars, the way she asked questions that looked simple until you were halfway through answering them and realized you had gone somewhere you hadn’t expected to go. He allowed himself the particular pleasure of their debriefs afterward, which had developed over the course of November into something he would have called ritual if he’d been willing to examine it that closely.
He did not allow himself to notice the way she tucked her pen behind her ear when she was reading something that required both hands. He did not allow himself to register the sound of her laugh when she and Yara crossed the courtyard below his office window on Fridays, bright and surprised and entirely different from her professional voice. He did not allow himself to catalog the details of her — the way she talked about books like they were people she was slightly worried about, the way she grew animated when something genuinely engaged her and then seemed briefly surprised by her own animation, as if intensity was something she kept leashed and occasionally forgot to keep leashed.
He was, he recognized, developing an extremely specific set of compartments.
It was November now. The semester had found its rhythm — the particular groove of a course that has gotten over its initial uncertainty and settled into something that felt, if not easy, then at least familiar. His undergraduates were reaching the point in a semester where the early enthusiasm had worn off and the late-semester panic had not yet arrived, which was the useful middle ground where actual learning sometimes happened. He was teaching Hardy this week, *The Return of the Native,* and he had just spent seventy-five minutes in the seminar making the case for Eustacia Vye as one of the great tragic heroines of Victorian fiction.
“She wants too much,” he had said. “That’s her crime. She has the audacity to desire a life larger than the one her circumstances allow.”
He had not been looking at Amara when he said it, but he had been aware of her in the peripheral way he was always aware of her, and he had felt — not seen, felt — the moment when something in her attention shifted.
Now, sitting across the seminar table from him in the empty room, they were doing what they did every Thursday after the students had gone: unpacking the session, noting what had worked and what hadn’t, mapping the next week’s approach.
“The Eustacia discussion landed differently than I expected,” Amara said, her notebook open. “The female students especially. I had three of them come to office hours this week specifically because of last week’s Brontë discussion, and I think today’s will send more.”
“What do they come to talk about?”
“Their papers. But also—” she paused, considering. “Whether it’s okay to want things. Whether ambition is readable as a character flaw or a virtue. They frame it as textual analysis but they’re asking about themselves.”
He studied her. “Is that common?”
“For women in their early twenties reading Victorian novels? Yes. Fairly universal, I think.” A brief pause. “I remember doing the same thing. Reading Middlemarch at nineteen and feeling like George Eliot had somehow described something about me that I hadn’t found words for yet.”
“What did you find in Middlemarch?”
“That Dorothea Brooke was brilliant and that the world was going to punish her for it, and that she was going to be okay anyway.” She said it simply, without sentiment, and he understood from the way she said it that it had been important and that she was sharing it with the matter-of-fact trust of someone who didn’t make a performance of her interior life. “It helped me understand what I was doing here. Why it mattered.”
He wanted, suddenly, to ask about her. Not about Victorian literature, not about the TA program or her research or the paper she was preparing — about her. Where she had grown up, what her parents were like, how she had gotten from there to here. She was not a mystery he wanted to solve; she was a story he found himself wanting to hear.
He said none of this.
“Hardy’s response to Dorothea is *The Return of the Native,*” he said instead. “Eustacia’s tragedy is that she mistakes the wrong man for her escape route.”
“Don’t we all,” Amara said, and then seemed to hear what she’d said and looked back down at her notebook. “I mean — thematically.”
He almost smiled. “Thematically. Yes.”
The debrief wound down around five o’clock, the way it always did, and she gathered her notes and he stacked his books, and there was the usual moment where the professional structure reasserted itself and they became professor and TA again after forty-five minutes of being something slightly less categorizable.
He had started to look forward to that forty-five minutes in a way he was deliberately not examining.
He had started to look forward to things in general, which was the real problem. He looked forward to Thursdays. He looked forward to the emails she sent with grading notes, which were concise and acute and occasionally very funny in a dry, understated way she seemed barely aware of. He looked forward to the moments in seminar when she would ask a question and he would watch the room scramble to catch up with where she’d gone, and feel the particular satisfaction of working alongside someone who operated at the same level.
He had not felt this way since before his marriage had fallen apart. That was an extremely unwelcome observation and he was filing it immediately.
She was his TA. She was twenty-five years old. He was thirty-seven with a harassment claim in his file and a divorce behind him and a dean who had already issued one warning. He had no business wanting anything that was not contained entirely within the professional parameters of their relationship.
He kept telling himself this on the walk home through the November cold — past the library with its warmly lit windows, past the coffee shop where two undergraduates huddled over laptops, past the last of the autumn leaves lifting off the pavement in a small cold gust — and it was the right thing to tell himself, the correct and appropriate thing, the kind of thing a man with any wisdom at all would tell himself.
It did not make him feel less alive.
That was the word, when he was being honest with himself in the privacy of his own apartment with a glass of whiskey and a book he wasn’t reading. *Alive.* He felt more alive at five o’clock on Thursday afternoons than he had felt in three years. Since before Monica filed the claim, since before the marriage had started to decay, since before he’d understood that the life he was living was missing something essential and had chosen, with the stubbornness of a proud man, to pretend that the missing thing was fine to go without.
He poured more whiskey.
He opened his book — *Middlemarch,* which he was rereading for the fourth time, which he had not consciously planned but which now struck him as possibly not accidental — and read the prelude. *The history of man is a history of incomplete mastery.* Something like that. Eliot’s version was more beautiful, as always.
He read until eleven and went to bed.
He dreamed, briefly, about nothing he could remember in the morning.
He was relieved about that.
He was also, though he refused to acknowledge it, slightly disappointed.
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