“Is that so? And what about the allegations of favoritism?” He tapped at a set of papers in front of him. “I have a report here that claims Mr. Price has been providing you with the answers to exams in your core classes.”
“What?” Panic shot through her in a dizzying rush. “That’s not what happened. I’d been struggling to keep up in my classes. He let me borrow his old notes to study.”
Whitehall dragged out his chair and settled into it. For a long moment, he sized her up without speaking, as though determined to discern the truth by osmosis. She’d never felt more breakable, pinned in the steady disapproval of his stare.
“If you’re having difficulty in your classes,” he said, lacing his fingers over his stomach, “the Student Aid Center can be found on the second floor of Gibbons Hall.”
“I know.” Her throat felt tight. “They offered the services of an interpreter.”
“And that was not sufficient?”
“Well, I—” The room felt too small, the air too tight, and she was once again diminished to little glass Delaney, all full of cracks. “I’m not fluent,” she said. “In sign. I know enough to use at home with my parents, but not enough to keep up in school.”
Pushing out a sigh, Whitehall readjusted his glasses. “I regret to say, Ms. Meyers-Petrov, that while I can certainly empathize with your situation, students who’ve been caught cheating on exams face immediate expulsion from the program.”
“But Ididn’tcheat.”
“So you say.” He rose from the desk and headed for the door, then pried it open. Sunlight fell inside in a blistering swath of gold. “Consider this meeting your one and only warning. I can’t entirely fault you for being so misguided—Mr. Price was meant to act as a mentor, and he failed spectacularly. The way he’s conducted himself is unacceptable. He’s been relieved of his duties as teaching assistant and placed on probation for the remainder of the semester.”
She understood by the way he hovered at the door that she was being dismissed. Her heart hammered in her throat. Her hands had gone clammy. She felt very sincerely as though she ought to be on the verge of tears. Eyes pinched, throat tight.
Instead, deep in the core of her, something sinister bled into her veins like a poison. Something old and cold and violent. A little unsteadily, she rose from her chair, weak-kneed and wobbling and wishing to be almost anywhere but here, caught under a microscope of disdain.
Whitehall stopped her at the door, his hand closing over her shoulder in a way that was not entirely welcome. “I’d like to offer you a piece of unsolicited advice,” he said, “if I may.”
That sinister something lashed out like a whip, and she was met with the sudden, startling urge to scream right in his face. To tear down his books one by one by one. To claw at the walls until the paneling came loose.
Instead, she said, “Of course.”
“You’re a good student,” he said. “And I can tell you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. The behavior exhibited by Mr. Price is more than just a disappointment; it’s dangerous. If I were you, I would think very carefully before having any further contact with Colton Price.”
In a storage unit at a storage yard on a side street in a sleeping neighborhood of Boston, there was a door.
Not a corporeal door, nothing so simple as that. Nothing hewn from wood, fashioned out of the bones of trees. Nothing pieced together with rails and stiles and screws. Nothing built with mullion-split glass, sleek transoms, and crossable thresholds. Nothing pretty. Nothing ugly.
Just nothing at all.
It sat in the dark, a sliver in space. It was the air of a faraway breeze rippling through the ether. It was the hiccup of gas where nitrogen and oxygen collided.
It was a door, and on the other side was a storage unit, quite a lot like the first, on a mirror side street in a mirror borough in a mirror Boston, under a mirror night sky dusted with thousands of mirror stars. Farther away, past sleepy Chinatown dotted in white-tented food markets and under the gold-leafed magnolias of Post Office Square, there was a neat paved street lined with neat brick houses.
Out of the second-to-last house stepped Liam Price.
It was late. It was cold. All morning long, the October sky had been flat and gray, but now the sliver of sky overhead was sugared in starlight, the wind off the harbor winter bitten. He drew up his collar tight and descended the iron rail steps to the street, an athletic bag strapped over his shoulder.
He was in a mood, though just to look at him wouldn’t have made it immediately clear. He’d never been the kind of person to wear his emotions in his face, or to carry them in his shoulders. Allison said—once, in an argument—that talking to Liam was like trying to process with a rock. He’d thought, then, that it was a very insensitive thing for a wife to say to a husband.
It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things; it was just that he was the sort to work his feelings out through physical activity. Life was, he liked to tell Janine in the adjacent cubicle, all about the little things. For him, it was a brisk run along the Charles, a cold beer and a round of darts, an hour or two on the rink. The last was where he thrived: skates kicking up sprays, his stick in his hand, the black spin of his puck hitting net. For an hour or two, he’d take out his frustration on the ice and pretend things were as simple as they’d been when he was small and C.J. was alive and he didn’t know every last name of Janine’s thirteen cats.
And, anyway, it wasn’t that he’d had aterribleday, it was just that it was the same as every other. He’d spent the first half of it sitting through meetings that could have been emails, the second half reading emails that could have been texts. His last hour was occupied by the incredibly mind-numbing task of spinning in his overpriced ergonomic chair and listening to the harrowing details of Bing Clawsby’s brush with ear mites.
So now, to counteract a day of absolute mediocrity, he was headed to the ice.
He drew short as he rounded the corner, a prickle building at the back of his neck. He was by a crosswalk, alone in an empty intersection. A car drove by, headlights carving through the dark and disappearing around the corner. He watched it go, red brake lights like lit cigarettes. He felt deeply uneasy.
Liam Price was, for all intents and purposes, a thoroughly unexciting person. He didn’t deviate from his norms. He went to and from work. He went to and from the grocery store. He went to and from the pub down on State. Sometimes, when Allison’s lingering Catholic guilt reared its ugly head, he went to and from church.
He’d never been in a bar fight, or arrested, or engaged in any sort of violence. He’d never taken self-defense or martial arts. And yet, he knew. He knew right away. He thought, fleetingly, that there must be something innately programmed into a man to recognize when he was being followed.
