failed in everything else. Everything I touch becomes contaminated or destroyed…[Long pause…]
“There is one thing I can do for you and that’s find you another thesis advisor. Professor Katherine Picton is a friend of mine, and although she’s retired, she has agreed to meet with you to discuss the possibility of directing your project. This will be a tremendous opportunity, in more ways than one. She asked me to have you contact her directly via e-mail, as soon as possible, at K Picton at U Toronto dot C A.
“I know it’s officially too late for you to drop my seminar, but I’m sure that’s what you want. I will approach one of my colleagues and see if she will supervise a reading course with you, which will enable you to have enough credits to graduate, even if you drop my class. I’ll sign the drop form and work it out for you with the School of Graduate Studies. Just tell Paul what you want to do and ask him to pass on the message. I know you don’t want to talk to me.
[Clears throat.] “Paul is a good man.
[Muttering…] “Audentes fortuna iuvat.
[Pause—voice drops to almost a whisper.] “I’m sorry you don’t want to know me anymore. I will spend the rest of my life regretting the fact that I wasted my second chance to know you. And I will always be conscious of your absence.
“But I won’t bother you again. [Clears throat twice.]
“Good-bye, Julianne.” [Long, long pause before Gabriel finally hangs up.]
Julia was stunned. She sat, open mouthed, with her phone in her hand, trying to wrap her mind around his message. She listened to it again and again, puzzling out the words, but the only part she readily believed was the quote from Virgil, Fortune favors the brave.
Only The Professor could use an apologetic voice mail as an occasion to re-assert his academic prowess and give Julia an impromptu lecture on Peter Abelard. Julia moved past her annoyance, deciding not to follow his suggestion and read Abelard’s letters. Instead, she turned her attention to the more interesting part of his message, his mention of Katherine Picton.
Professor Picton was a seventy-year-old, Oxford-educated Dante specialist who had taught at Cambridge and Yale before she was lured to the University of Toronto by an endowed chair in Italian Studies. She was known to be severe, demanding, and brilliant, and her erudition rivaled that of Mark Musa. Julia’s career would be greatly advanced if she were to write a successful thesis under Professor Picton’s supervision, and she knew it. Professor Picton could send Julia anywhere for her doctorate, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard…
Gabriel was single-handedly giving Julia the biggest career opportunity of her life, gift-wrapped with a bright, shiny bow—an opportunity worth far more than a messenger bag or the M. P. Emerson bursary. But what were the strings attached to this gift?
Atonement, Julia thought. He’s trying to make up for every wrong he has ever done me.
Gabriel was asking Katherine Picton to do him a favor, for Julia. Emeritus professors rarely, if ever, directed doctoral dissertations, let alone masters’ theses. This was a tremendous favor that would have required Gabriel to call in all of his markers with Katherine.
All for me.
After she contemplated this new information from all angles, Julia pushed everything aside to focus on the single question that filled her heart with shameful dread.
Gabriel is telling me good-bye?
She listened to the message three more times, and with more than a little self-criticism, she cried herself to sleep. For despite all her defiance, there was a flame in her that recognized its twin in Gabriel. And that flame could not be extinguished, unless Julia was willing to extinguish a part of herself.
Early the next morning, she called Paul under the pretence of making plans to meet him before Emerson’s seminar. She hoped that he would tell her that Emerson had gotten sick or mysteriously left for England or taken ill with swine flu and cancelled his seminar for the rest of the semester. Sadly, he had done none of those things.
Julia decided that she would continue attending the Dante seminar, just in case Gabriel had trouble finding her a reading course as a substitute. Indeed, if Professor Picton became her thesis advisor, Julia was confident she could tolerate being in Emerson’s seminar for the five remaining weeks of the semester. So that afternoon, she wandered into the office of the department in order to check her mailbox before she was supposed to meet