Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 8: Four months
She told Yara on a Sunday afternoon in January, sitting on Yara’s couch with her knees pulled to her chest and a mug of tea going cold on the cushion beside her.
She had not intended to tell anyone. She had carried it since Boston with the particular self-sufficient stubbornness that was, she was aware, one of her less endearing qualities — the conviction that she could manage things alone, that naming something was a step toward losing control of it. She had spent three weeks in December between semesters buried in her own work, in her research and her reading and the long solitary hours of the holiday break that she usually found peaceful but which had felt, this year, unexpectedly hollow. She had spent the drive back to campus in January telling herself that whatever she had felt in that elevator was chemistry and proximity and a semester of intellectual intensity, and that it would resolve itself naturally if she simply refused to look at it.
Then she sat down in Yara’s living room on a gray January Sunday and it came out anyway, the way contained things always eventually did.
“I have feelings for Dr. Lancaster,” she said.
Yara put down her phone with the slow deliberateness of someone savoring a moment. “The hot brooding professor.”
“He’s my supervisor.”
“Of course you do,” Yara said, as if this were a conclusion she had arrived at some time ago and had simply been waiting for Amara to catch up. “He’s obviously brilliant and he’s clearly fascinated by you and the combination of those things is catnip for you specifically.”
“He’s twelve years older than me.”
“I know.”
“He’s my direct supervisor for the rest of the semester.”
“I know.”
“There was a harassment claim from his ex-wife — it was baseless, it was investigated and dismissed, but it’s in his file and he’s extremely aware of the optics of anything involving—”
“Amara.” Yara said her name with the patient precision of someone who had known her for four years and understood how her brain worked. “I know all of this. Tell me what happened.”
Amara told her about Boston. The bar, the conversation, the elevator. The step he had taken back and the words he had said and the face he had made when he said them — not cold, not dismissive, just genuinely, visibly afraid in a way that was somehow worse and better than anything else he could have done.
Yara listened. Her expression moved through several stages — interest, sympathy, a brief flash of something that might have been exasperation — and when Amara finished she was quiet for a moment, in the way of someone who is ordering their thoughts rather than failing to have them.
“He has feelings for you too,” Yara said.
“Apparently.”
“And neither of you can do anything about it until the semester ends.”
“He won’t. Regardless of how the semester ends. The harassment claim changed him — he won’t risk anything that could be read as inappropriate. It’s not just ethics, it’s—” she paused. “He’s protecting himself. I understand it.”
“But you also think he’s wrong.”
“I think—” she stopped, started again. “I think the ethics are real. I think the power dynamic is real and matters and I’m not interested in arguing it away. But I also think he’s using the ethics as a reason to not do something he’s afraid of for entirely separate reasons.”
Yara tilted her head. “What do you do with that?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing I can do. I’m not going to push — he’s my supervisor, he’s already said no, I respect both of those things.” She picked up her tea, put it down again when she felt how cold it had gone. “I just — I needed to tell someone.”
“Have you told him?”
“No.”
“Good,” Yara said, unexpectedly. “Don’t.”
Amara blinked.
“Because if you do it now, while you’re still his TA, you put him in an impossible position. He either reciprocates, which causes all the professional problems he’s terrified of, or he doesn’t, which is humiliating for you and makes the rest of the semester unbearable.” Yara pulled her feet up onto the couch. “Wait.”
“That’s your advice. Wait.”
“You’re both adults! You’re both free! But you’re also in a professional relationship with a clear end date.” Yara shrugged with the equanimity of someone who found clarity where others found complexity. “How many months until your TA contract ends?”
“The semester ends in April.”
“So. Four months. If this is real — if he’s real — it’ll last four months.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then you have your answer about how real it was.” Yara reached over and squeezed her hand. “You’re the most patient person I know, Amara. You’ve been working toward this PhD for six years. You can wait four months.”
It was, when it was laid out that clearly, almost simple.
She sat with it on the walk home, hands deep in her jacket pockets, the January campus quiet around her. The library was lit up against the gray sky, a warm gold rectangle. A group of undergraduates crossed her path in a laughing cluster, shedding scarves, utterly unconcerned with Victorian literature or professional ethics or the specific difficulty of working alongside someone who looked at you the way he did and called it professionalism.
She thought about the elevator. The step forward and the step back. The particular, shattering quality of almost.
Four months.
She could do four months.
She had done harder things.
When Monday came she went to the seminar room at two o’clock and held office hours with the same patience she always brought, and at five-thirty she was in the anteroom when he arrived, and he said *Good evening, Miss Hassan* and she said *Good evening, Professor Lancaster* and they worked in their usual parallel quiet, and nothing was different and nothing was the same.
She caught him looking at her once — not at her work, at her — and when she looked up he looked away, and she looked back down at her papers and counted to ten in her mind and then kept grading.
Four months.
She started counting.
Reader Reactions