Page 106 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
Sloane gives a look that saysI’m too well-bred and gracious to say what I’m really thinking. “This has nothing to do with Sara or Joey—or Leo or Alessandro, for that matter. And it barely has anything to do with me. Now, get up, get up! Put those long legs to use!”
With a sigh, I push away from my desk, pack up my satchel, and stand up to get my coat.
“How was your week?” I ask as we leave the office and I flick off the light before closing the door. “I haven’t seen you much since...”
“Since my new tenant broke your heart?”
“Yes, that,” I say wryly.
“It’s fine, I guess.” Gerhart is mostly empty as Sloane leads me downstairs and out the front door. Dr. Monty, the primordial campus cat, trundles roundly across our path and then across the sidewalk-faceted lawn to the library.*
“Are you sure?” I ask. “I know you’re supposed to move out of Persimmon Hill soon.”
Sloane’s delicate exhale is nearly lost in the bitter wind dancing between the limestone buildings. “The condo I’m supposed to buy, the one on the river, won’t be ready in time. Some construction delay or another. So I’ll either need to move into a hotel or hope some poor student drops out of school midyear and frees up an apartment. I don’t relish either option, honestly, but Lucien is... firm... about my leaving Persimmon Hill in a timely manner. Which is his right.”
“He barely lived there when you were married,” I grumble, irritated on her behalf. Lucien was gone, always, it seemed, for work or for work-adjacent things, for barely disguised affairs that never seemed to dent his obsession with Sloane for as often as they occurred. Sloane was left to keep up appearances and semi-parent his teenage son, who had zero respect for his young stepmother and spent his last two years of high school making her life hell. “It’s only to be a dick that he wants you out now.”
“He’s angry I wanted out,” Sloane says with a sad sort of smile. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work, you see. I was supposed to stay the same tender, malleable ingenue who married him. I wasn’t supposed to hate his affairs or have my own career or decide no amount of money or glamour was worth staying for. Here we are.”
I pause. We’ve come to Parker Hall, the oldest building on campus, symmetrical, stone, and forbidding. Also half dark—it’s after five and the bursar’s office and counseling offices inside are shutting down for the weekend. It’s a gorgeous building, possibly the heart of the university, but I step foot in here maybe once a semester.
I turn to Sloane. “Why?”
Sloane takes my arm and pulls me up the shallow stone steps to the door. “Because you have a class tonight.”
“Ihave a class tonight?” I’m completely baffled. And tired. And wishing I was at home nursing a beer and sketching something in my greenhouse, shading in the night shadows and capturing the feeling of growth in the dark.
“That’s what I just said. You don’t listen so well.”
She’s hustling me through the central atrium with its historic, coffered ceilings and down the hall, which is mostly dark.
“Just through there,” she says. “Last one on the left, with the lights on.”
“Wait—”
But she’s just pressing her chilled lips to my cheek and then walking away, her red coat the only bloom of color in the building.
I turn and look at the door she’d indicated—a massive wooden one with an old-fashioned transom window above it. Golden light glows from inside.
Utterly confused, I go to the classroom and open the door. And then freeze.
The classroom is one of the few classrooms left on campus thatlookslike a stereotypical college classroom—rows of wooden desks attached to seats, maps hanging from walls, a long wooden desk for the professor with a bust of Walt Whitman on it. The chalkboards have been upgraded to dry erase boards, and the usual chandelier of technology hangs from the ceiling, but otherwise, this classroom is much the same as it was a hundred years ago.
And at the front, trailing a dark red fingernail over the edge of the desk, is Madelyn Kowalczk, wearing a black skirt with a slit up the thigh, a black, long-sleeved shirt with buttons marching up to her neck (not that it matters, the shirt is see-through, showing the flimsy camisole she’s wearing underneath), and a pair of dark green heels that should be illegal based on the ankle straps alone. Her hair, still dark and flawlessly cut. Her lips a brighter red than Sloane’s coat.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Bram
Take a seat, Mr. Loe,” she says, looking over at me.
Longing rips through me, followed by empty, cramping pain. I haven’t seen her in two weeks, and my memory has played me false, because she’s more beautiful than I remembered, more arresting. Just her eyes on mine is enough to make me want to drop to my knees. And beg. Beg beg beg.
But there is some animal sense of self-preservation buried in me yet, and I don’t move. It hurt enough to muster all that polite grace when we had to share the twins’ afternoon and evening routine—I don’t know that I can endure being told again that I’m an impediment to her future, that I’m a decent fuck and nothing else. It’s so much easier to be dormant, frozen, the structure of myself and nothing more, than be here and present and looking at her.
Then Maddie taps her finger on the desk, angling her chin so that she’s looking at me with a cool sort of impatience. “Don’t keep us waiting.”
I—I don’t know what to make of this, but there’s something about the way she regards me, with the authority I taught her to wield, in clothes nothing like her focus-grouped florals, that has me obeying like I am indeed a sheepish first-year late to class. I close and lock the door behind me and then walk between the desks.
