After My Fiancé Built a Secret Life With My Sister

I taught my Thursday morning seminar on Virginia Woolf like I always did. Stood at the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker. Wrote out the key passage from 'A Room of One's Own' in my neat block letters. Asked questions. Called on students. Listened to their answers with the same focused attention I'd given them for three years.

No one noticed anything.

Between my afternoon seminar and my four o'clock office hours, I drove to the Tribeca penthouse. Kieran was at his Midtown office. I knew his schedule better than he did. I had forty minutes.

I moved quickly through the apartment, packing two boxes with books, a framed photograph of my parents, the set of linen napkins my mother had embroidered before she died. Small things. Things that mattered only to me. I left the furniture. I left the art. I left the kitchen gadgets we'd chosen together at Williams Sonoma on a Saturday afternoon two years ago.

I stacked the boxes in my car and drove them to Hadley's spare room.

I did this four days in a row.

On Friday, a delivery arrived at my Columbia office during my afternoon office hours. Sixty white gardenias in a crystal vase so large the delivery man had to make two trips from the elevator. The card was in Kieran's handwriting: *You are still my everything. Please.*

I read it once. Set it down on my desk. Then I walked into the hallway where three graduate students were standing by the coffee machine.

"Would you like a flower?" I asked.

They looked at me, then at the massive arrangement visible through my open office door.

"Um, sure?" said Maya, a second-year PhD candidate.

I handed her a stem. Then another. Then I walked down the hall, distributing gardenias to everyone I passed. Graduate students. Faculty. The department administrator. The janitor restocking paper towels in the third-floor bathroom.

By the time I returned to my office, the vase was empty.

I dropped Kieran's note in the recycling bin beside the coffee machine and returned to my desk to finish grading midterm essays.

On Thursday morning, I taught my ten o'clock lecture on feminist literary theory. Fifty students in the auditorium. I walked them through the historical context of second-wave feminism, the theoretical frameworks, the key texts. I fielded questions. I made a joke about Simone de Beauvoir that landed exactly as I'd intended. Two students laughed.

The lecture ended at eleven-fifteen.

I gathered my notes, packed my bag, and walked toward the exit at the back of the auditorium.

Kieran was standing in the corridor.

I saw him before he saw me. He was wearing the charcoal suit I'd helped him pick out last spring. His tie was perfectly knotted. His hair was combed. But his face looked wrong. Too pale. Too tight.

Students streamed past him, backpacks bouncing, voices overlapping. He didn't seem to notice them.

Then he saw me.

He moved toward me, his expression shifting into something raw and desperate. I kept walking, my pace unchanged.

"Sky," he said. His voice cracked on my name.

I adjusted the strap of my bag on my shoulder and continued past him.

"Sky, please." He was following me now, his footsteps quick behind mine. "Just stop. Just for one minute."

I reached the stairwell door and pushed it open.

He caught the door before it closed and followed me into the stairwell. His breathing was uneven.

"I can't do this," he said. "I can't lose you. Please. Just come home. Let's talk. Let me explain."

I descended the stairs, my heels clicking against the concrete. He followed.

"Sky, I'm begging you."

I reached the ground floor and pushed through the door into the main corridor. Colleagues were passing. Graduate students. A visiting lecturer I'd met at a faculty dinner last month.

Kieran dropped to one knee in the middle of the hallway.

Conversations stopped. Heads turned.

"Please," he said, his voice loud now, too loud. "I love you. I've always loved you. Nola was nothing. A mistake. It's over. It's been over. You're the only one I want. Please. Just come home."

I looked down at him. His eyes were red. His hands were shaking.

A second-year PhD student I didn't know well was standing near the bulletin board, her phone in her hand, pointed at us.

I stepped around Kieran, the way I would step around a piece of furniture blocking my path. I greeted Professor Chen, who was walking past with a stack of papers under his arm.

"Good lecture this morning, David," I said.

"Thank you, Skylar," he replied, glancing briefly at Kieran, still kneeling on the floor, then back at me.

I continued down the hallway, my pace unchanged, and pushed through the glass doors into the autumn sunlight.

Behind me, I heard Kieran's voice, quieter now, breaking.

I didn't look back.