Zara's Dad?

The lecture hall was full and I was completely empty.

Professor Langley's voice bounced off the walls of the economics lecture hall and dissolved somewhere before it reached me. I had my pen in my hand and my notebook open and my eyes pointed in the right direction and none of it meant anything because my brain had checked out approximately forty minutes ago and shown no signs of coming back.

Zara hadn't come to class today.

I knew she wouldn't.

I kept seeing her face. The way she had looked on that bed with her shoulders shaking and her eyes so red they looked painful. I had sat with her until past midnight holding her together with nothing but my presence because presence was the only currency I had.

I needed to get back to her.

But I also needed to fix this grade situation and every day I didn't fix it was a day closer to a problem I couldn't fix at all.

Professor Marcus Cole's course sat in the back of my mind like a stone I couldn't stop turning over. The grade was bad. Not bad as in needs improvement but bad as in I had barely shown up for half the semester and the content I had actually attended had gone in one ear and completely out the other because I genuinely did not understand it and had been banking on a solution that had now permanently closed itself off.

I tapped my pen against my notebook and thought about it the way I had been thinking about it since I walked out of his office, not the rejection itself, I was almost past that, but the man. The specific architecture of a person who could sit across from everything I had offered and feel nothing. Or feel something and override it so completely that the result was the same as feeling nothing.

What kind of man did that?

“What if I speak to him?” I told myself.

Just a conversation.Student to lecturer. Was there a version of this where I walked in there and sat down and said I genuinely need help and he responded like a human being rather than a wall?

The thought sat there and I turned it over.

But I was running out of other options.

Professor Langley dismissed us at half past eleven and I was out of my seat before the echo of his voice had settled.

I walked across campus with my bag on my shoulder and my mind already in that third floor corridor and knocked on Professor Marcus Cole's door with two clean knocks and opened it.

He looked up.

Something moved across his face…brief, controlled, gone before it fully formed. "Miss Hayes."

"Professor Cole." I closed the door behind me and this time I did not lock it. I sat down in the chair across from his desk without being invited and put my bag on my lap and looked at him directly. “Is there a problem Miss Hayes?"

He said, waiting.

"I need help," I said. The words came out simpler than I expected. "Actually, with the course. I don't understand the material and my grade is…" I stopped and started again. "I need to pass this course to graduate. That's it, that's why I'm here."

He studied me for a moment with those unreadable eyes.

"Miss Hayes," he said, and his voice had lost some of the edge from last time, replaced with something more measured, "the material is not inaccessible. It requires consistent engagement and genuine effort. Nothing more complicated than that."

"I know."

"Do you?" He leaned back slightly. "Because from what I can see you have attended less than half the classes this semester and whatever engagement you have had has clearly not been academic in nature."

I held his gaze. "I know. I'm not arguing that."

Another silence.

"The only way through this course," he said carefully, "is to read the material. Study it. Come to the remaining classes and actually be present in them. I run office hours on Thursdays between two and four." He looked back at his papers. "If you come with genuine questions I will answer them. That is what I can offer you."

That was it.

I stood up. "Okay."

He glanced up briefly like my lack of argument surprised him slightly.

"Thank you," I said and picked up my bag and walked out.

The corridor felt longer on the way back.

I walked slowly with my hands in my pockets and thought about Thursday office hours and a textbook and the mountain of catching up that stood between me and a passing grade.

It wasn't impossible.

It was just going to be hard and I was going to have to ask for help and sit in a room with a man who had already seen me at my most embarrassing and study something I genuinely did not understand and do it all while everything else in my life was currently on fire.

Fine.

I could do hard things.

My phone buzzed.

Are you coming today?

I stopped walking and read it twice.

I typed back immediately.

On my way.

I changed direction toward the parking lot.

There were two cars outside the Callum house that hadn't been there yesterday.

I parked behind them and grabbed my bag and headed up the path and let myself in the way I always did. Zara had stopped making me knock approximately two years into our friendship.

The living room stopped me.

Two men. One I didn't know sitting in the armchair closest to the window looking thin, sharp featured, the kind of man who looked like he survived on black coffee and anxiety. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees talking in a low voice.

And the other one.

I don't know what made me stop exactly. I had been moving and then I wasn't and my brain took a moment to catch up to my feet.

He was sitting on the far end of the couch and he wasn't doing anything remarkable but just listening. He was tall even sitting down. Built broad across the shoulders, his jaw was sharp and clean and his skin smooth in a way that made his age genuinely difficult to place. Dark hair with the faintest grey at the temples. He looked expensive without looking like he was trying to.

I made myself move toward the stairs.

Went up, knocked on Zara's door, sat with her for twenty minutes while she talked about nothing and everything the way grieving people did and I listened and said the right things.

Then I wanted to get her water.

"I'm getting water," I told her. "I'll be right back."

I came back downstairs.

The thin anxious man was gone.

The other one was still there.

He looked up when I came off the last step and his eyes were dark and steady and they landed on me and stayed there.

"Hello." His voice was low and unhurried and had a depth to it that settled in the room like something solid.

"Hi," I said.

"You're here to see someone?"

"My best friend." I moved toward the kitchen doorway. "Zara. I'm sure you heard what happened to her mum."

He nodded once. Something moved through his expression briefly. "I did."

I filled a glass at the kitchen tap and came back out and he was still looking at me with that same settled attention and I was forming a polite exit when footsteps came fast on the stairs behind me.

"Dad?"

I turned.

Zara was on the third step from the bottom in her oversized hoodie with her hair pulled back and her eyes still slightly swollen and she was looking at the man on the couch with an expression that had about six different feelings competing in it simultaneously.

"Dad," she said again but quieter this time, like she was checking if it was real.

I looked at him.

Then back at her.

Then at him again.

This man. This broad shouldered, sharp jawed, dark eyed, expensive looking man with the voice that landed like something heavy…

Was Zara's dad?