Page 8 of Proof By Contradiction
I open the laptop. The glow turns everything blue. Probably look deranged—no mirror on this side, plausible deniability.
I type:Dr Laurence Haldrey, mathematician.
This isn’t stalking. Stalking requires physical proximity and a disregard for restraining orders. This is a boy in his pants at 2 am with WiFi.
The university page comes up first. Staff profile. Dr Laurence Haldrey, Lecturer in Mathematics. Photo: professional, neutral background, no awkwardness required. He’s failed anyway. Jaw, glasses, the hair pushed back—a man who could break rules and walk out clean.
Below the photo: qualifications, BA Mathematics, Oxford. PhD Pure Mathematics, Cambridge.
Oxford. Then Cambridge, then Manchester.
That’s not a career trajectory. That’s a descent. Papers in journals from my late-night rabbit holes: work that should’ve led to Trinity, not a 9 am lecture for hungover economists.
Between Cambridge and here, a break.
There it is, the gap. Cambridge ends. Manchester starts almost a year later. Twelve months of nothing. No visiting position, no sabbatical. Just a hole where a career should be.
People don’t fall from Cambridge to Manchester without a push.
Scroll to the bottom.
Office hours: Tuesdays, 14:00–16:00. Room 2.14, second floor, maths building.
One line on a staff page, typed in the flat font of a university template, meant for the panicked first-year who wants to know whether the first coursework’s worth forty percent—meaning, in other words, for nobody but me.
I read it three times. The first for the room number. The second for the time. The third because reading it feels like being in the room.
Close the tab. Open it again. Read it once more to check I didn’t make it up.
Didn’t make it up.
I take a breath and keep browsing.
Facebook.
Old, semi-abandoned, a profile that hasn’t been updated since 2019. Cover photo: a library. Profile picture: abstract art, blues and whites, something between trying too hard and not trying at all. Everything else is locked. Privacy pulled tight.
But profile pictures are always public on Facebook. And under this one, fifty likes, no comments except one.
Hugo Lockhart:Still your favourite. x
Three words and a kiss. Under a painting, on a dead account.
Ninety-nine people would scroll past that. A friend commenting on art. But I’m not ninety-nine people. I’ve been reading signals since I was a kid, the tilt, the angle, the extra word that doesn’t need to be there.Still, your favouriteisn’t about a painting. It’s what someone writes who stood next to youwhile you looked at it. Who knows which ones you stop in front of?
And the x. One small letter that transforms the whole thing entirely.
Next to the comment, Hugo Lockhart’s profile picture—a man at a lectern, mid-smile.
My stomach clenches, rebellious.
The laptop stays open—half two, a lecture at nine, unhinged behaviour.
I click his name.
Hugo Lockhart’s profile is the opposite of Haldrey’s. Public. Updated. A man who wants the world to see him—conference photos, dinners, everywhere. I scroll through them, assembling a face mostly out of the knowledge that Haldrey knows him.
A kitchen, morning light. Two men at a counter, coffee mugs, and the remains of breakfast. Hugo in a t-shirt, grinning. And next to him, slightly behind, half-turned from the camera like he didn’t want to be in the shot.
