Page 73 of Open Water
He handed me half a bagel wrapped in a napkin.
"Eat."
I ate it but didn't taste it. We walked.
The campus was quiet for the end of the semester, people were mostly studying and that day there was a specific gray quiet of late November. Our breath showed. Liam didn't try to make me feel better, which is the thing I'll never be able to explain to anyone about him. Everyone in my life has a speech. My father has speeches. Eldridge has speeches. Liam walked me across a frozen campus toward the room where they might end my future and he talked about whether the heating in his dorm was broken or just bad, and it was the only thing in the world that could have kept me upright.
Whitaker Hall came up out of the cold. Stone. Old. The oak doors I'd walked through eleven days ago with campus police on either side of me. Inside those doors, the hallway. I knew the hallway. Class photos in dark frames going back a hundred years. My grandfather's face. My father's face. The empty rectangle of wall where mine was supposed to go someday, that might now stay empty forever.
We stopped at the steps.
"They won't let you in," I said. "It's closed. Family and parties only."
"I know." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "I'll be right here."
"It could be a couple hours."
"Then I'll be right here in a couple hours."
I looked at him. The cold had gone into his face and made it red and he was already settling his weight back on his heels like a guy preparing to stand in one place for a long time, and I wanted to say something and there was nothing big enough, so I didn't.
"Go," he said. "Don't let them see you sweat. You're good at that part."
I went up the steps. At the top I looked back and he was still there, hands in his pockets, watching me go in. Then the oak door closed between us and it was just me and the hallway and the faces of every Harrington man who'd ever owned this place.
I walked past all of them. I didn't look up.
The conference room was too warm and smelled like furniture polish and old coffee.
Dean Patterson at the head of the table. University counsel beside him, a thin man with a legal pad. Eldridge along one wall, arms crossed, face shut. Across the table, Marcus.
He looked worse than me. The nose I'd broken had set crooked and there was still a black ring under one eye, and he sat very straight next to his father — same jaw, same expensive haircut, thirty years added. Richard Caldwell.
And the empty chair beside me.
That was the thing my body clocked before my brain caught up. There was a seat beside me, set, with a water glass in front of it, and it was empty. They'd prepared for someone who wasn't coming. I looked at it and understood, and the understanding did something cold and slow to the back of my neck.
He wasn't going to be here. If he was, he'd already be here.
I'd spent the whole night bracing to see my father's face across a table since I told him no. I'd built the whole fear around it — the cold eyes, the disappointment, the thing he'd say that would get under my ribs. And he hadn't come. He hadn't bothered. Because I was no longer his problem.
A woman I didn't know sat down next to me and slid a folder across. "Alex. I'm Dr. Reyes, your faculty advocate." Kind face. Tired. Someone whose actual job was to be on my side, for my sake. "Just answer honestly. I'll handle the rest."
Honestly. I almost laughed.
Patterson opened it. The charge. Assault. A student, in a university building, with witnesses. He read it in the flat voice of a man who'd read a hundred of these, and then he looked at me.
"Mr. Harrington. Do you understand the charge?"
"Yes."
"And how do you respond?"
I could feel the old machine wanting to start up. The one my father built.Minimize. Frame it. He provoked you, you feared for your safety, there was a struggle, the contact was incidental.Every Harrington instinct I had was lined up at the gate, ready to perform the version of events that made me smaller and the room more comfortable.
I thought about Ethan's film. A woman painting at three in the morning and not wiping her face.
"I hit him," I said. "More than once. I broke his nose and I kept going after it was broken. I knew what I was doing."
