set off at the smallest display of emotion. I rest my hand on his arm.
“Forget it. The extra work isn’t worth the money, anyway.”
He laughs. “You have a point.”
“But, thank you, it’s all good.” Let’s face it, the professorship is the least of my problems.
I get through the rest of the day with no news, and by this point I’m seriously considering calling the police myself. I’m marking papers with the overhead light on. It’s raining outside and it’s getting cool, so I have an old Locke Weidman sweatshirt on because my office has a thin, horizontal window below the ceiling—more like a vent, really, the type that you tilt open by turning a crank—but it’s been stuck for ages now so I can’t close it.
The door is open, as it usually is, and June appears. She holds on to the handle and something in her demeanor makes me sure that finally, this is it. I hope I am ready. I don’t feel ready.
“Have you heard?” she asks softly.
“Heard what?”
A beat. “About Alex?”
She’s unusually pale and when she purses her lips together the corners of her mouth pull down like she’s going to cry. I sit back in my chair and put the pen down on the desk. “Is something wrong?”
She takes one step closer and quickly glances behind her down the corridor before closing the door.
“He… Alex… he’s dead. I’m so sorry.”
I flinch. “Alex? My Alex?” I ask this with a hand on my chest and my eyes opened wide. Carla did that last night as part of her scene and I made a mental note of it, then rehearsed it myself in front of the bathroom mirror this morning.
June nods. “Yes.”
I cock my head at her. “No, he’s not. I spoke to him just yesterday.” This was true, of course. There would be a record of that and I have just put it on the record that I am probably the last person to speak to him and I’m not hiding anything.
“He’s dead, Anna. They found him a few hours ago.”
Her words conjure the image I’ve been trying to banish from my mind. I feel my chest compress the air out of my lungs, and there’s a moment where I’m not sure I can get it back in. I sit there, looking at her, suddenly unable to speak. The room is airless in spite of the broken crank. Then I realize I’m not asking any questions. I find my voice again.
“Who told you? Who found him?”
“The police called. Val in student services told me just now.”
I cover my face with my hands. “Oh my god.”
June comes around my desk and touches my shoulder gently. “It’s not your fault, Anna.” I look up so quickly it hurts my head.
“He was not well. Everyone knows that. There was nothing you could have done.”
I breathe out again, slowly. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Maybe I pushed him too hard.” I stare at her in shock: did I really just say that? I put my hands over my face and pretend to cry but suddenly I’m laughing and I can’t stop. Luckily, tears are streaming down my face anyway.
June scans the room for a chair, then pulls the one from the other side of the desk around to my side. She sits so close to me our knees almost touch. I’ve never been this close to June before. I barely notice her, to be honest. I realize now how pretty she is, with her bouncy black curls and her curvy shape. She looks younger than me, but I think that’s because she’s in better shape than I am; we’re both nudging forty.
“That has nothing to do with it,” she says, and for a moment I forgot what we were talking about. “You know what Alex was like, how difficult it was for him. He was depressed…”
I stare at her for a moment. “How would you know that?”
“He told me. He was worried about how obsessive he had become. He didn’t sleep for days at a time. I don’t know how he managed, frankly.” I stare at her in disbelief. Alex was my student, my protégé, and yet June who, as the faculty executive assistant, isn’t even part of the teaching staff, knew so much about his inner demons.
What else did she know?
“He told you all this? When?”
“I don’t know exactly. Over the last few weeks. You saw what it was like. Did you see how much weight he’d lost? Did you see