Formal discussion.
Still, his mind jumped to the most reasonable conclusion—contract renewal. Timing fit. December was coming. He even felt faintly pleased. Rector Hoffmann wouldn’t bother with a meeting otherwise.
He glanced back at his open email draft, suddenly unable to remember what he’d been writing.
“Hans, is everything okay?” Amelia asked.
“Just need to go to a meeting in an hour.” Then he muttered, “In an hour,” to himself.
Plenty of time.
Too much time, really.
He tried to work. Answered two emails without absorbing a word of either. Straightened a stack of papers that didn’t need straightening. Checked the clock. Checked it again. The minute hand seemed to be moving out of spite.
When the hour finally arrived, Hans grabbed his coat and headed across campus, the familiar corridors feeling slightly off, like he’d walked them in a dream before. By the time he reached the main building, his earlier confidence had thinned into something quieter and heavier.
Outside the Rector’s office, he stopped, adjusted his sleeve—no idea why—and raised his hand.
He knocked.
A moment passed. Then, from inside, the voice he’d been expecting since the phone call. “Come in.”
Hans had assumed this was paperwork.
That was the problem, really—he’d walked into Rector Hoffmann’s office with the relaxed dread of a man expecting to sign something mildly annoying and then reward himself with coffee. A renewal. A stamp. A handshake. Done.
Instead, the office felt… staged.
Too neat. Too quiet. Rector Hoffmann stood by the window instead of behind his desk, hands folded like he was about to officiate a funeral or a wedding—hard to tell which. The city of Rostock lay gray and respectable outside, as if it had also agreed to behave.
“Herr Schroeger,” Rector Hoffmann said warmly, turning. “Please sit.”
Hans sat. The chair was firmer than expected. He adjusted anyway, folding his hands in his lap like an employee.
“This won’t take long,” Rector Hoffmann added.
That should have been comforting. It wasn’t.
“So,” Rector Hoffmann began, smiling the way administrators did when they were about to remove something important from your life, “I’ll come straight to the point.”
Ah, there it was. Hans felt his shoulders tense before his brain fully caught up.
“Your contract,” Hoffmann said, “will conclude at the end of December.”
Hans blinked once.
“Oh,” he said. Then, because his mouth was still optimistic, “Right. And the renewal—”
“There will be no renewal.”
The words landed with surprising politeness. They didn’t shout. They didn’t accuse anyone. They simply existed, and Hans suddenly had to rearrange his entire understanding of the next year to make room for them.
“I don’t understand,” Hans said, and hated how stupid that sounded. “My evaluations—”
“Excellent,” Rector Hoffmann said immediately. “Across the board. Your teaching, your research, your engagement with students. Truly exemplary.”
Completely useless.
