Page 129 of Hushed

“I need to go to the bathroom for a second and pull myself together.”

Bastien smiles at me. “Okay. Come and find me at our table.”

A woman finds me when I’m working my way across the ballroom. “You’re the husband,” she says, and then winces. “Sorry. That came out — I’m Bethany. Hi.”

“Hi. Yes. I’m Dr. Saint-Jacques’s husband.” I glance at her name tag, which reads Fairhaven University. I know all of the faculty by sight now, so I’m pretty sure this is one of those graduate students Preston carted along. She’s in her mid-twenties. “How can I help you?”

She takes a drink from a passing waiter and finishes it in one go. “Can I ask you something a little forward? How did you get him to marry you? I mean with the whole…”

“You mean, with the fact that he was my professor? He was my boyfriend before that. We were already well on that track. We just moved up the date, that’s all.”

“But, you know, with the university, and the rules, and everybody watching. How did you two just decide to do that?”

I don’t want to be here. I want to go be with Bastien. I need him to make me feel whole again. “Courthouse for the paperwork, church for the rest. But we’ve been together a minute.” The more I say that lie, the more I convince myself. I look over at Bastien and for a second I can feel the rightness of it. I imagine a world where Bastien had been waiting for me to ETS, where he sent me sappy love letters that I kept bound together and reread until they started to dissolve. His face waiting for me when we were released from every deployment, waiting for me to scoop him into my arms.

I wish we’d had that. I wish I could have had that to come home to.

I realize that I’ve been looking at him for a little too long when I notice that she’s saying something. “Say again?” I say.

“I’ve got a friend. Who’s in love with somebody she shouldn’t be. She’s been asking me for advice and I thought you might have some.” She glances over her shoulder and I see her scan the crowd before she lights on Lincoln Preston.

“Oh,” I say. “I don’t think your friend and I were in the same boat. I was never in love with someone I shouldn’t be. I’m here to support my husband and his research. Can you excuse me? I see he’s waiting.” Bastien and I were always together. Bastien and I belong together. Bastien and I are not role models for you. Do not ruin this for us, Bethany, I think.

She looks like I’ve just dashed her last hope. “Oh. Of course. Sorry. Thank you.” She pivots and melts into the crowd.

I find Bastien at our table and get my mouth near his ear. “I think Preston’s sleeping with a grad student. If he isn’t, she’s in love with him.”

He doesn’t turn his head. “How do you know?”

“I’ll tell you later.” I nod at some people drifting by the table.

The Kirkfields come to us, and we both stand to receive them. He’s one of the two tuxedos, his face reddened. She wears her hair in a cloud around her head, and a violet gown.

“Dr. Saint-Jacques. We’re glad to have you, after such an eventful few weeks,” he says.

I catch the slip immediately. His wife looks daggers at him for half a second. Apparently, he was supposed to pretend he didn’t know about those eventful few weeks.

“Thank you for having me.” Bastien’s chin comes up. “My husband, Levi Knight. He’s just out of the United States Army.”

“Army,” Mr. Kirkfield says. “And what are you doing now?”

“Studying international relations, sir. First semester.”

“Good, good. Now, when I was at Washington and Lee we had a fellow teaching us Russian history who’d been in the OSS, or so he said, and every autumn he’d tell the story of how he—”

Mrs. Kirkfield presses two fingers into her husband’s side. He stops on the word and looks at her. She looks at him significantly. He wrinkles his brow and turns to us, determined to finish his story. She clears her throat. He stops and turns to her. She links her arm with his. “We mustn’t keep you,” she says with a bright smile as she guides her husband away from us.

We sit down again, and the Fletchers join us shortly afterward, like they’ve been avoiding the table until the last possible second. They go on speaking to everybody who arrives after us, and around the two of us, like we’re a centerpiece nobody chose. Bastien answers the questions he’s asked, which is none of them. I stop talking about ten minutes in. They serve the salad.

Dr. Fletcher turns to my husband. “There’s a literature on this, you know.” She says it conversationally, the way you correct a student’s spelling. “On how men in your position get what they want. It isn’t seduction. That’s what people misunderstand about it. It’s much slower than that. You do a young man a long series of small kindnesses he has no way to pay back. And by the time you want something from him, he can’t tell the difference anymore between being grateful and being in love.”

Then she looks at me, for the first time all evening, and it is with pity.

You vile bitch, I think. That’s what she wants to do. She wants to unmask my husband in front of me. This is her public service for the day. Somebody give her a goddamned medal.

“I’m sure you feel yours was different,” she continues. “They always do.”

I was there and I did every bit of the chasing. I could give her the hour and the minute I decided that I was going to go all in on him.