Page 65 of Marrying My Professor

I see Brandon's face in each of them.

The hope. The desperation. The belief that this organization will give them something they can't get anywhere else—power, belonging, purpose, a family. The willingness to endure anything, sacrifice anything, become anything, if it means being part of something bigger than themselves.

Brandon stood where they're standing. Smiled the way they're smiling. Believed the lies they're believing.

And then he died for it.

19

ELARA

The box is heavier than it looks.

I shift my grip on the cardboard, fingers finding purchase on the bottom edge as I navigate through Alexander's office door. The hallway stretches empty in both directions—most faculty cleared out hours ago, leaving just the hum of fluorescent lights and the particular silence that settles over academic buildings after dark. My footsteps echo against linoleum as I carry the box toward the growing stack near the elevator.

"Where do you want this one?" I ask, setting it down with more force than necessary, the cardboard corners hitting the floor with a dull thud.

Alexander doesn't look up from the filing cabinet he's methodically emptying, his shoulders tight beneath the grey sweater he changed into after we got home from the Spring Ball. "Living room is fine. We'll sort through everything at home."

Home. The word still feels strange in my mouth. Foreign. Like I'm trying on someone else's vocabulary, wearing someone else's life.

I turn back to the office, scanning the half-dismantled space for the next box to fill. His desk is already bare—the impersonal landscape photos gone, the leather desk pad rolled up, even the coffee mug he uses every morning packed away in tissue paper like it matters, like any of this matters when his entire career just imploded because of me.

Three weeks. We've been married three weeks, and already his life is unraveling.

"Stop it," Alexander says without turning around, his voice carrying that particular tone that means he knows exactly what I'm thinking.

I blink, my hand stilling on an empty box. "Stop what?"

"Whatever self-flagellation is happening in your head right now." He pulls out another file, glances at the label with clinical efficiency, tosses it in the 'keep' box without ceremony. "I can feel you spiraling from here."

"I'm not spiraling."

"You're breathing like you're about to hyperventilate, and you've been standing in the same spot for thirty seconds staring at nothing." Now he does turn, those storm-gray eyes finding mine with uncomfortable accuracy, reading me like one of his legal texts. "So yes,Ppet. You're spiraling."

The endearment makes my chest tighten in that particular way it always does—affection and guilt and something warmer all tangled together until I can't separate one emotion from another. Makes me want to cross the room and press my face into his chest and let him hold me until the guilt stops clawing at my throat with razor-sharp fingers.

Instead, I grab another empty box from the stack and move to his bookshelf, needing to do something with my hands. "I'm fine."

"Liar."

My hands still on a copy of Legal Ethics in Modern Practice—the irony isn't lost on me, isn't lost on either of us probably. "You lost your job because of me."

"I'm on administrative leave. There's a difference."

"Semantics." I yank the book from the shelf harder than necessary, the spine catching on the neighboring volumes before coming free. I nearly drop it. "You're being investigated. Your reputation is⁠—"

"My reputation was a carefully constructed lie long before you walked into my classroom," Alexander interrupts, his voice calm but firm, that professor tone he uses when he's making a point he needs me to understand. "Atticus Drexel's reputation died eight years ago. Alexander Draven's reputation was always borrowed time."

I set the book in the box with deliberate care, lining it up precisely with the edge because if I can control this one small thing, maybe everything else won't feel so chaotic. "That doesn't make me feel better."

"It's not supposed to make you feel better. It's supposed to make you understand that this—" he gestures broadly at the half-empty office, at the boxes stacked like accusations, at the institutional humiliation of being escorted off campus like a criminal "—was always going to happen eventually. You just accelerated the timeline."

The casual acceptance in his voice makes something hot and angry flare in my chest, makes my fingers curl against the cardboard. "How are you so calm about this?"

"Because falling apart won't change anything." He closes the filing cabinet drawer with a soft click that sounds too final, too much like an ending. "Because I've already made my peace with the cost of keeping you alive. And because right now, I need to focus on making sure we both survive what comes next, not on mourning a teaching position I never wanted in the first place."

I should let it go. Should accept his forgiveness and move on and focus on packing like he asked, like a good wife who doesn't destroy her husband's entire existence just by existing.