being petty because I’d lost the funding for a research project I thought I would have.”
He waited patiently as she took a bite of her meal, not rushing her. She appreciated it. She had never actually tried to tell anyone exactly what had happened in its entirety.
But she’d certainly thought about it. Had spent hours of her life trying to figure out how she might have changed things. Where had the fulcrum actually tipped to the point of no return?
If it all hadn’t happened in one semester, certainly that would’ve made a difference. But when she’d lost the research data a few days after her project wasn’t funded, that had been suspicious.
When she sat back and looked at it objectively, she could understand everyone’s skepticism. How much bad luck could one person have in a few short months?
She understood how it might be construed that she’d been acting out or self-sabotaging, and Peter’s relationship with Nancy was as good a reason as any.
“So that was strike one and strike two, so to speak,” she finally said. “Then, a couple of weeks later, as everything was finally starting to die down, and I thought it had all blown over, somebody broke in and vandalized my office.”
Baby let out a low curse.
“Yeah, and in Gavin’s defense, it did look similar to what we saw in the house this morning.”
Baby shook his head. “But don’t all vandalisms look somewhat the same? Destruction is destruction.”
She took another bite. “All my books were thrown all over the place. Furniture tipped over. Nothing of value taken. I called campus security, and they did the expected stuff–looked through security footage on campus for anyone suspicious, tried to get any fingerprints. They ended up with nothing.”
“Surely, nobody tried to say any of it was your fault.”
She shook her head and ate a fry. “No, or if they did, they didn’t say it to my face...at least at first. It was written off as a burglary that escalated when the thief couldn’t find anything of value.”
“That seems logical. Did you demand they do something more to find out who had destroyed your office? Is that when security escorted you off campus?”
She hadn’t gotten to the worst of her story. She swallowed her bite of food.
“So, it hadn’t been my best half a year.” She let out a sigh. “I should also say that financially, the divorce hit me a little harder than it should have. I have a lot of student debt between undergrad and grad school. Peter was older and already well established when we got married, and I didn’t want to feel like I was a financial burden on him, so we agreed to split all our expenses fifty-fifty. That meant I was not paying off as much on the student loans as I should have been over the course of our marriage.”
She tried to take another bite of her burger but found she couldn’t. This wasn’t easy to talk about. “And status was important to me, and to him, so we had a very nice house with a very nice mortgage, and I had a lease on a BMW. Anyway, when we split up, we lost money on the sale of the house, and all of a sudden, I had a lot more debt on top of my student loans.”
“Not an easy place to find yourself.”
“Even worse, it took me a while to realize how desperate my financial situation really was. I had to do damage control quickly. I moved into a much smaller and more remote apartment and, well, you’ve met the car I traded in for my BMW.”
Baby smiled softly. “Yes, I have.”
“I had one account I had been putting money in for years. My sabbatical account. Once you become a tenured professor, they give you a semester off from everything to do research.”
He nodded. “I know the concept.”
She took a fry and twirled it around in the ketchup on her plate. “My sabbatical was something I’d been looking forward to my entire career. I was going to travel around Europe to gather info for an academic paper on comparative literature. After I lost my job, I tried not to dip into that account, hoping to still use it for its intended purpose one day when I worked at a different university. But things finally got dire enough that I knew I would have to use it. No point going hungry while you had money in a vacation account.”
She would never forget the feeling