Bloomington

Something True

5:47 A.M.

Catherine had always woken up before the world caught up with her.

It was an old habit. Years of early office hours, lectures at eight, department meetings that nobody wanted at nine. Her body had learned long ago that the quietest part of the day belonged to her, and even now, with nowhere to be, it refused to forget.

She lay still for a few minutes, listening. Jackie slept the way she did everything: with total commitment. One arm thrown above her head, hair across her face, breathing slow and even. Ethan was a warm, dense shape at the foot of the bed, twitching through some dream about squirrels.

Catherine watched them both for a moment.

Then she slipped out from under the covers, pulled on Jackie's hoodie from the chair, and padded quietly to the kitchen.

--

She made coffee. The real kind, with the French press Jackie had complained about missing at the cabin. She sat down at the kitchen table, opened her laptop, and stared at the empty document she had been staring at for three days.

The cursor blinked.

She had tried starting with a title. Failed. Tried starting with an abstract. Failed. Tried just writing a single sentence about attachment theory and ended up deleting it four times because it sounded like someone performing intelligence rather than actually having it.

The problem, she was beginning to understand, was not that she had forgotten how to write.

The problem was that she kept trying to write the wrong thing.

Every time she tried to sound like Professor Stark, she came up empty. Because Professor Stark had resigned. Professor Stark had handed Hecht her letter, watched him tear the photographs in half, and driven home to a silent house where she sat in the kitchen for three hours without turning on a single light.

That woman was not coming back. And maybe that was okay.

--

Catherine Stark had been, for most of her adult life, a woman who kept people at a very comfortable distance.

Not unkindly. She was never unkind. But she had learned early that closeness had a cost, and she had decided, somewhere around thirty-two, that she preferred to set the terms of payment herself. There had been people before Jackie. A colleague in the philosophy department who had lasted four months before she realised she was bored. A woman she met at a conference in Portland, smart and funny and completely wrong for her, whose calls she eventually stopped returning. Others. None of them bad people. None of them the point.

She had told herself it was because she was particular. That she had high standards. That she valued her independence.

The truth, which she had spent a long time not looking at directly, was simpler and less flattering.

She was afraid.

Not of being hurt, exactly. She had been hurt. She knew the shape of it and had decided it was survivable. What she was actually afraid of was something quieter. Being known. Really known, the way you can only be known when you stop performing and just stand there, with all your contradictions showing, and wait to see if the other person stays.

Nobody had ever stayed long enough to find out.

And then Jackie Kirk had walked into Hecht's office on a Tuesday morning in August, and Catherine had left the room as fast as she reasonably could, and spent the next three weeks telling herself it was nothing.