Page 141 of Boiling Point
I shook my head. “No. I’d rather you hear it from me. That’s why I’m here.”
I took a breath.
I flashed my engagement ring.
And then I told them everything.
Cal didn’t call to me when I came in. The hush was total—no music, no TV, just the faint asthmatic exhale of the air conditioner. I found him in his study, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, dry-erase marker in hand. He was working the whiteboard like it owed him money—dense equations snaked across its surface, all punctuated by angry arrows and half-erased dead ends. He’d written so hard, the marker tip was jammed up the barrel.
I hovered in the doorway, then crossed to the low bookshelf and leaned against it.
“I’m back,” I offered, voice soft as a mouse.
“I noticed.” The marker squeaked, punctuating the syllables. He didn’t turn.
I stared at the board until the symbols blurred into a language I barely remembered. “What are you working on?”
He capped the marker without turning. His shoulders sagged. “Path integrals for a massless scalar field.” He recited as if reading from a teleprompter. “I’m attempting to model a scenario where the system’s symmetry spontaneously breaks under nontrivial boundary conditions, but the maths keep collapsing.”
He’d lost me at “scalar.” I sat on the low-slung sofa. “Sounds intense.”
“Not really,” he said, tossing the marker. It rolled off the desk and hit the floor with a light thud. “It’s busywork. Theoretical escapism.” He turned, finally, and I saw the stress of the day etched in the circles under his eyes. He looked at me, gaze sharp but unfocused, as if he were searching for the right point of entry.
I supplied it for him. “Aren’t you going to ask me how it went?”
He smiled, but it was bitter. “Since you’ve apparently decided my fate for me, I figured you’d tell me. If you’re so inclined, of course.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t act like I wanted to hurt you. I did it to help—to make the board understand the truth. Without me, they’d have filled in the blanks with fiction, and the fallout would be way worse.”
“Did you help build the scaffold too?”
“First of all,ouch.” I folded my arms so he wouldn’t see my hands shake.
He looked at me but didn’t flinch.
“And I’m the one trying to take the damn thing apart before they hang you from it.”
He exhaled—long, barely audible. “I see.” A silence opened, and at first, I thought it was anger—some unspoken rebuke. But instead of erupting, he just slouched into his desk chair, spine bowed, hands dangling between his knees. “And did you?” His voice softened a touch.
“I did everything I could. I gave Dr. Monroe the screenshots and told her about every time I saw Sloane Cartwright being…Sloane,” I said. “And I told her…what really happened between us last spring.”
He narrowed his eyes. “The whole truth?”
I nodded. “Everything.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in a sharp breath. “And?”
“She didn’t ask for details—just wanted to know if I felt pressured, or if you’d ever used your position to influence me. I told her ‘absolutely not.’ That if anything, you’d gone to absurd lengths to keep things appropriate.” I tried to laugh, but it stuck in my throat. “I made sure she understood I’m an adult with a backbone and a full set of executive functions—not some naïve eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school. And that this”—I gestured between us—“is the long-term real deal. Not some silly infatuation or fling.”
He looked at me as if seeing a ghost version of himself. “And did it make a difference?”
“I think so.” I pictured Dr. Monroe’s steady gaze, the way she’d met my eyes after I finished. It was a look I recognized—not judgment, but clinical curiosity. Maybe even empathy. “She said she’d bring it to the full board. But it’s out of my hands now.”
He raked a hand through his disheveled hair, then dragged both palms down his face. “It won’t change anything,” he muttered. “They’ll protect the institution, not the truth. That’s how these things always go.”
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands slack between them—his whole body curved like he was bracing for impact.
“And you—” His voice caught. “You shouldn’t have had to go to them. That should have been me.”
