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หน้าหลัก / Romance / Grading On A Curve / บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

บททั้งหมดของ Grading On A Curve : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

35

The Rival Student

The woman reached Calder first."Professor Calder." She said it with the neutral efficiency of someone who had been looking for him specifically and had stopped being relieved upon finding him at about the same moment she registered who he was standing with. "I'm Dr. Cole, from the review committee. I believe my assistant emailed about scheduling an interview this week. We had some difficulty confirming."Calder's voice came back without a gap. "I apologize for the delay. I've had a full week.""Of course." Dr. Cole's eyes moved once to Mia, the brief, professional sweep of someone cataloguing information without visibly doing so, and then back to Calder. "I was crossing to the faculty building and recognized you from the department directory. If you have thirty minutes now it would save us both the scheduling difficulty.""Of course," he said.That was it. That was the whole of it. A routine interview request that had arrived by ema

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-08-25

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First Grade

She was on her feet before she'd fully woken up.Four steps to the door, handle down, pulled it open in one motion, and the hallway was empty. The fluorescent strip overhead hummed its flat, indifferent hum. Both directions clear. The stairwell fire door at the far end was closed and still. No footsteps. No retreating figure. Nothing in the hallway except the specific, mocking quiet of a space that had been occupied and vacated in the thirty seconds it took her to move from her bed to the door.She looked down.The mat outside their door had one thing on it that hadn't been there this morning. A folded piece of paper, plain white, no envelope. The kind of paper that came from a library printer or a campus computer lab, the slightly cheap, slightly gray white of institutional printing rather than personal.She picked it up. Unfolded it.One page. A single email, printed with full headers intact. The timestamp at the top. The sender line. The recipient line. Her name in the To: field, f

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-05

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Calder's Doubt

He released them at twelve on the dot.The standard shuffle of a lecture ending, the compression of twenty four people reaching for bags and laptops and half finished water bottles at the same moment, the noise of it filling the room in a wave. He was already turning to erase the board annotations when he heard the room change density, the particular shift in acoustics that meant most people had cleared the door, and he turned back without fully deciding to.Mia was gone. Not among the last few stragglers finishing their notes, not by the door adjusting her bag, not in any of the places she usually was for the thirty seconds between the lecture ending and the room fully clearing. Just gone, faster than he'd seen her leave any previous session, and the third row where she'd been sitting showed nothing except a chair pushed back slightly further than the others, the angle of someone who'd stood up quickly.He looked at the row behind hers.Jonah Whitmore was the last student out. He too

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-08

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Crossing a Line

She walked the long way home.Not a decision, just what her feet did while the rest of her was occupied with the image on the phone screen. Dani's face at the edge of lamplight, turned toward the library steps with the full, deliberate attention of someone who had not happened to be there. Who had stood in the dark and watched. Who had let Mia walk home afterward and pour tea and sit across from her at the kitchen table and say nothing, not one word, about having been thirty feet away when it happened.The apartment was quiet when she got in. Dani's keys on the hook. Dani's shoes by the door.Mia stood in the hallway for a moment. Then she pushed open the kitchen door.Dani was at the table with her laptop open and a pen in her hand and the specific, preoccupied posture of someone who had been doing something and was now not doing it, the way people looked when they heard footsteps and had a half second to rearrange themselves before the door open

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-09

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Act One Cliff

The door swung fully open.Reyes.He stood in the doorway with a faculty copy of something under his arm and his keys in his hand and the particular expression of a man who had knocked and received no answer and had therefore opened the door he'd been told was always open, and who was now standing in the frame of it reading a room that took approximately one second to read.His eyes went to the desk. To their hands.Calder's hand moved off hers before the second second arrived. Not fast enough to look innocent. Fast enough to establish that he knew it needed to move.Nobody said anything for a beat that lasted much longer than a beat."I can come back," Reyes said. His voice was entirely neutral, which was worse than if it had been anything else."Ms. Reyes was just leaving," Calder said.She was already reaching for her bag. The muscle memory of six weeks of exits from this office had its own efficiency by

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-10

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Department Politics

The light in his office stayed off.She stood on the quad with the cold finding its way through her jacket and the portal notification still on her phone screen and watched the dark window for thirty seconds that achieved nothing except confirming that the light was definitely off and Reyes and Calder had definitely left together and she had definitely been standing here long enough that staying any longer would start to look like something.She walked.Not home. Just the movement of a body that needed to be somewhere other than directly under the window of a man whose name had just appeared next to hers on a university investigation document, and walking in no particular direction was the only thing she could think of that didn't require a decision she wasn't capable of making right now.The formal complaint notification was still on her screen. She kept looking at it the way you looked at a bruise you'd just gotten, checking whether it was still

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-11

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She Told Whitfield

Dani didn't answer.That was the answer.Mia stood in the doorway of the living room with the kitchen light behind her and watched the color drain out of her best friend's face in a way that skin didn't do unless the body underneath it had just received a shock, and the shock in this case was not the question but the fact that the question was being asked at all."Dani.""Mia." Her voice was wrong. Too controlled, too careful, the voice of someone who had rehearsed a version of this and was discovering that the rehearsed version was useless now that the actual thing was here. "Let me explain before you.""Give me the laptop.""Let me explain first.""Dani." Her voice came out low and even and completely unlike the voice she'd been using for anything in the last six weeks because this was different in category from everything in the last six weeks. This was the floor. "Give me the laptop."Dani closed it. Set it

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-12

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Priya's Cards

She opened the bedroom door.Not because she'd decided to. Because standing in the dark on the other side of it had stopped being an option and doing something, anything, was better than the specific quality of stillness that arrived when the floor dropped and you were still standing on it anyway.Dani was in the hallway with her phone face out, the camera feed on the screen showing the building entrance below. Calder standing in the cold with his jacket collar up and his hands at his sides and the posture of a man who had arrived somewhere and was prepared to wait as long as the waiting took."Let him in or don't," Dani said. "I'll do whichever you tell me."Mia took the phone and looked at the feed for a moment. His face in the grainy camera image, upturned slightly toward the lens, the angle of someone who knew where the camera was and wasn't hiding from it. The specific, open quality of a man who had come to say something and was prepared to s

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-13

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Six Weeks Before

The phone rang seven times and went to voicemail.Neither of them moved while it did. They sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table and listened to it ring in his hand and when it stopped the silence it left behind was the particular silence of something that hadn't finished happening."Who is she," Mia said.He put the phone face down on the table. Looked at it for a moment. Then looked at her with the expression of a man who had arrived at the point in the night where the choice was between the full version and a version of the full version, and had finally run out of reasons to choose the second one."Her name is Clara Voss," he said. "She was a graduate student at my previous institution. Second year of her doctoral program. She attended a seminar series I ran in the autumn of my last year there."Mia said nothing. Let him get to it at whatever speed he was going to get to it."There was a session that ran late. Everyone el

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-14

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Clara

Calder picked up the photograph.He turned it over once, looked at the back, plain white, no writing, the blank reverse of a print developed from a digital file rather than a processed negative. Professional print quality. Not a phone photo printed at a campus kiosk. Someone had access to equipment and had used it deliberately."How did she get into the building," Mia said."She didn't need to get in. She needed someone to let her in." He stood. "Morrison has had a key to this building for thirty years."He was already moving toward the stairwell before she'd fully processed this, and she followed because staying in the hallway alone with the photograph felt worse than following him out into the cold at whatever hour this was. They went down to the street and he walked fast without running, the pace of someone who had somewhere to be and understood that running would look like something neither of them could afford to look like on a campus covered

ปรับปรุงล่าสุด : 2026-09-15

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