RESEARCH

TYLER

Three hours in, and the blue light of the laptop screen is the only thing in the room that hasn't changed. Everything else has gone still around it - the coffee gone cold at my elbow, the traffic outside thinned to nothing, the building itself settling into that particular silence that only comes after midnight.

I have a system. Faculty directory, archived version, cross-referenced with the department's old newsletter PDFs that nobody bothered to delete from the server. Names. Dates. A woman named Camille Reyes who taught adjunct for two semesters and then didn't. No announcement. No goodbye email forwarded to the listserv, the kind they always send when someone leaves on good terms, all warm platitudes and *we wish her well in her future endeavors*. Just an empty slot in the spring roster where her name used to be, a silence shaped exactly like a person.

I don't feel my pulse pick up when I find it. That's not how this works for me. Other men would call this jealousy, would let their hands shake, would need to stand up and pace the apartment like the walls are closing in. I'm not other men. I sit very still and let the fact settle into place next to the other facts, and something closer to satisfaction than anger rises in me, the quiet click of a lock finding its key. A missing piece found. A shape starting to resolve out of static. I have always preferred the moment before understanding to the moment after - the reaching, not the having - but this comes close.

Julian likes people to think he's easy. Loose tie, coffee in hand, that laugh he does that sounds like it costs him nothing. I used to think that too, back before I understood him, back when I still believed the version of a person is the whole person. It isn't. Easy is a costume, same as mine. He wears his to make people underestimate what he wants and how far he'll go to get it. I wear mine so nobody watches me closely enough to notice I'm always three moves ahead. We are, in this one narrow way, the same animal wearing different fur, and some nights that thought amuses me more than it should.

I open a new tab. Search the resignation date against the university's academic calendar. Mid-semester. Nobody quits mid-semester unless they're pushed or they're running, and I have yet to meet a woman who ran from Julian Ashworth without being pushed first.

I don't write any of this down. I don't need to. I've always been able to hold a structure in my head the way other people hold a song, some architecture that just lives there, load-bearing, until I need to use it. It has never once failed me, this scaffolding. It's the one part of myself I trust completely - the same instinct that told me, weeks ago, to start timing Sophie's walks home, to know without asking that her dorm room faced the courtyard and not the street. I filed that away too, the way I file everything, and it has never once gone to waste.

Camille Reyes. Filed.

There's a thread on a forgotten alumni forum, half-dead, cobwebbed with broken image links, where someone mentions "the thing with Ashworth" like it's an inside joke everybody's supposed to get. Nobody explains the joke. I read it four times, each pass slower than the last, hunting for a shape in the negative space. I don't need it explained. I just need to know it exists, the way a lawyer doesn't need the whole case on day one, just needs to know there's a case to build. That's enough for tonight. That's enough to keep me warm.

Brick.

Brick.

I could act now. Could call the university, could dig up Camille Reyes's current employer and email her something vague enough to seem harmless and specific enough to get an answer. I don't. Acting now would waste the advantage of not being known yet. Nobody at that university has any idea I exist. That's worth more than a satisfied itch tonight, and I have never in my life mistaken patience for weakness, no matter what it cost me to wait - not that night I sat outside Lena's building for forty minutes, watching the little blue dot on the location app crawl closer down Fifth Street, before I let myself text her, timing it so it would look accidental. Some structures take longer to build than others. All of them hold, eventually, if you're patient enough with the mortar.

I open a new message to Julian anyway, because the anger has to go somewhere, even mine, and some nights even I need somewhere to put it that isn't my own chest.

*You think I don't see what you are. You think the accent and the books and the way you look at her like she's the only - *

I stop. Read it back. It sounds like a man who's losing, and I don't lose. I highlight the whole thing and delete it letter by letter, watching the cursor eat the words until the box is empty again.

I close the tab with Camille Reyes's name still glowing faintly in my memory, filed next to the forum post, next to the resignation date, next to every other brick I've been quietly setting since the night I first watched Julian Ashworth look at Lena across that stupid campus coffee shop like she was a book he hadn't finished. I'd told her I had a meeting near campus that afternoon, some plausible excuse about a client downtown, and let myself linger long enough to see them together through the window. I remember that night with a clarity that almost embarrasses me - the exact angle of his head, the exact length of the pause before he looked away. I have been building ever since.

I close the laptop.

I pick up my phone instead, and my thumb finds her name without any hesitation, because this part doesn't require thought, just muscle memory built over months of being exactly who she needs me to be, and there is a strange comfort in that muscle memory, the way a hand remembers a piano piece long after the mind has forgotten the notes. Her location still glows faintly in the corner of the screen, that small shared pin marking her dorm, steady and unmoving, exactly where it should be.

*Miss you. Dinner Friday? 🙂*

I send it and set the phone face up on the desk so I can watch the little bubble appear when she reads it, and somewhere behind my ribs the last of the cold calculation folds itself away, filed like everything else, and what's left on my face when I catch my reflection in the dark laptop screen is soft. Easy. Patient. A face built for trusting, and I have spent years learning exactly how to wear it.