and fun. She was wearing a tight black shirt and fitted black pants. Eric had glanced over her shoulder, searching for her, before he realized he was looking right at her. Her hair shone around her head and shoulders. He’d never seen her wear black before. He’d never seen her wear makeup before, either, not properly. He’d never seen the delicate skin at her collarbone, sprinkled with freckles, and wondered if the skin below it had the same freckles. She’d stared into his eyes then, and he knew that she knew what she’d become, and what she could do to him.
And later, a few hours later, she’d pulled him into the hall, away from her high school friends, and leaned in, and…
I’m sorry, Doctor, Eric said silently, opening his eyes. There are exactly three moments in my past that I never allow myself to remember. I remember they happened, but I can’t put myself back there again because I can’t live with that intense pain. This is the first of those three moments.
“It’s all right,” the doctor said.
Eric had fled that night, before the party had even ended. Fled straight to the train station, headed back to Saunders, and tried for the rest of that year to forget Cassidy Maxwell.
“Could you?” the doctor asked.
No, I couldn’t.
The next year, Cassidy arrived with her suitcases at Saunders, having just graduated as valedictorian, and signed up as a political science major. Just like Eric. He was now a Saunders grad, but he had an impossible time tearing himself away from the campus now that it had suddenly become more beautiful. He was making political contacts and headway, but found himself visiting Saunders often, dropping in on Professor Gilbert Harrison many times to talk. He didn’t recall what he’d said to tip the professor off, but one day Gilbert tipped him off about an assistant teaching position in the polisci department, and a couple of days later, Eric was standing in front of a lecture hall with Cassidy in the front row.
“That must have been hard,” the doctor said with sympathy.
It was hard, all right. He had been hard, watching Cassidy every day. Cassidy, who’d never verbally strung two sentences together in all the years Eric had known her, would raise her hand and wax brilliantly about any political topic, would debate any controversy with moxie. Young men and women alike were taken with her, and wanted to study with her, have dinner with her, be her friend or more.
But Cassidy’s biggest smiles were reserved for the person she’d been giving them to since she was a child. Eric could read those smiles as well as he always could. She wanted him. She knew he wanted her.
“Then what?” the doctor asked.
Cassidy respected the distance her old friend put between them. Even when that semester ended, he was still a faculty member, and both understood—without speaking to each other about it—that the teacher-student relationship had to be kept that way. But Eric had to be near her, had to be with her. They met off campus many times, and during those times, Cassidy reverted to her wordless ways. They brushed hands in a jazz club. He breathed in the scent of her neck as he pulled out her chair at a coffeehouse. Finally he found himself at four in the morning, sitting with Cassidy under the huge oak on the quad, the entire campus asleep around them.
I’m sorry, Doctor, Eric said in his mind. What I said, what she said, the promise we made—this is the second moment I can’t let myself remember.
“No problem,” the doctor said.
What Cassidy and Eric had vowed to each other kept him wide-eyed awake, excitedly alive, until Cassidy’s last semester as a senior. Then something… A toothache had sent Cassidy into emergency oral surgery, and she was laid up. Eric had tried to help her keep up with her work, but stubborn Cassidy had pushed him away, wanted to do everything herself. He’d seen less and less of her, and when he had seen her, she was pale, thinner, with bags under her eyes as big as coin purses. That last time he’d seen her, two days before her graduation, she’d been in the library, scribbling madly into a notebook. When he’d tapped her on the shoulder, she’d jumped, stared at him with frightening, bloodshot eyes, and bolted from the library, mumbling an apology, or something that sounded like it.
Graduation day dawned. A horde of black-robed seniors hurtled themselves off the main building’s stone stairs, shrieking with joy. Eric waited in the spot they’d chosen. Waited with a locket in his sweating hand, the one he’d wanted to give Cassidy as they began their new future together. The quad emptied around him as he stood alone in that moment…
“I understand,” the doctor said.
Eric was glad. That third moment he couldn’t let himself remember, that one was the hardest. The one he’d had no explanation for—for ten years.
He clutched the empty plastic cup in his hand, crumpling it, and suddenly a smiling flight attendant was there. He dropped it in the trash bag she held out and leaned back again.
He never searched Cassidy out. He’d refused to. His pride wouldn’t let him. But now, Professor Gilbert needed help from his former students to save his job, and everyone knew reliable Cassidy Maxwell would do anything for a friend. One conversation with a fellow Saunders alum and suddenly Eric was over the Atlantic Ocean, traveling to another continent to bring the only woman in his heart back into his life.
The main lights in the cabin blinked out. People around Eric reached for headsets and neck pillows, reclining their seats back.
“I’ll let you get some sleep. Good luck on your trip,” the doctor said.
Eric knew the luck wasn’t for him, but decided to take a little anyway. He was about to need it.
All he’d ever wanted to do was to help people. That’s why he became a professor. He wanted to teach young people, guide them, assist them in any way he could in making decisions that could affect the rest of their lives.
Now, there was one person Gilbert Harrison was powerless to help. Himself.
Gilbert laid his head down on his cluttered desk. His forehead knocked several file folders to the floor and he heard papers scatter, but he didn’t bother to bend down to pick them up. He just closed his eyes and listened to silence. It was nearly midnight, but he couldn’t go home. These days, it was hard to leave his office, because each time he did, he was forced to wonder if it would be the last time.
He’d done so much in this office, for so many students, for so many years.
The Board of Directors’ investigation, led by the vindictive Alex Broadstreet, was a humiliating chapter in Gilbert’s professional life at Saunders University. So far, he’d had his name dragged through the mud and he’d been forced to ask former students to return to campus to appeal to the board on his behalf. It was ironic, considering they didn’t even know the half of what he’d done for each of them, but he had taken a chance that their successes as alumni could sway the board and save his job. The only job he ever wanted to do.
And just as a candle of hope had begun to flicker, it was blown out again when he got Eric Barnes’s phone call today. Eric had called from Logan International Airport, about to board a plane to London to bring Cassidy Maxwell back to Massachusetts.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Gilbert had asked after a stunned pause.
“Ella Gardner and I had lunch last week,” Eric had answered. “She told me about you, and your trouble there at Saunders. Are you all right?”
“I’m
