trucks. It’s the beginning of October, full-blown fall, the time when everything in Portland appears straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog—pumpkins and gourds, jugs of apple cider. A woman in plaid flannel and duck boots crosses the square, smiling down at the baby strapped to her chest.
“Strane?”
He exhales a heavy sigh. “I guess you saw.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I saw.”
I don’t ask questions, but he launches into an explanation anyway. He says the school is opening an investigation and he’s bracing himself for the worst. He assumes they’ll force him to resign. He doubts he’ll make it through the school year, maybe not even to Christmas break. Hearing his voice is such a shock that I struggle to keep up with what he says. It’s been months since we last spoke, when I was gripped with panic after my dad died of a heart attack and I told Strane I couldn’t do it anymore; the same sudden onset of morals I’ve had through years of screwups—lost jobs, breakups, and breakdowns—as though being good could retroactively fix all the things I’ve broken.
“But they already investigated back when she was your student,” I say.
“They’re revisiting it. Everyone’s getting interviewed all over again.”
“If they decided you didn’t do anything wrong back then, why would they change their minds now?”
“Paid any attention to the news lately?” he asks. “We’re living in a different time.”
I want to tell him he’s being overdramatic, that it’ll be ok so long as he’s innocent, but I know he’s right. For the past month, something’s been gaining momentum, a wave of women outing men as harassers, assaulters. It’s mostly celebrities who have been targeted—musicians, politicians, movie stars—but less famous men have been named, too. No matter their background, the accused go through the same steps. First, they deny everything. Then, as it becomes clear the din of accusations isn’t going away, they resign from their jobs in disgrace and issue a statement of vague apology that stops short of admitting wrongdoing. Then the final step: they go silent and disappear. It’s been surreal to watch it play out day after day, these men falling so easily.
“It should be ok,” I say. “Everything she wrote is a lie.”
On the phone, Strane sucks in a breath, air whistling through his teeth. “I don’t know if she is lying, at least not technically.”
“But you barely touched her. In that post, she says you assaulted her.”
“Assault,” he scoffs. “Assault can be anything, like how battery can mean you grabbed someone by the wrist or shoved their shoulder. It’s a meaningless legal term.”
I stare out the window at the farmers’ market: the milling crowd, the swarming seagulls. A woman selling food opens a metal tub, releasing a cloud of steam as she pulls out two tamales. “You know, she messaged me last week.”
A beat of silence. “Did she.”
“She wanted to see if I’d come forward, too. Probably figured she’d be more believable if she roped me into it.”
Strane says nothing.
“I didn’t respond. Obviously.”
“Right,” he says. “Of course.”
“I thought she was bluffing. Didn’t think she’d have the nerve.” I lean forward, press my forehead against the window. “It’ll be ok. You know where I stand.”
And with that, he breathes out. I can imagine the smile of relief on his face, the creases in the corners of his eyes. “That’s all I need to hear,” he says.
Back at the concierge desk, I bring up Facebook, type “Taylor Birch” in the search bar, and her profile fills the screen. I scroll through the sparse public content I’ve scrutinized for years, the photos and life updates, and now, at the top, the post about Strane. The numbers still climb—438 shares now, 1.8k likes, plus new comments, more of the same.
This is so inspiring.
I’m in awe of your strength.
Keep speaking your truth, Taylor.
When Strane and I met, I was fifteen and he was forty-two, a near perfect thirty years between us. That’s how I described the difference back then—perfect. I loved the math of it, three times my age, how easy it was to imagine three of me fitting inside him: one of me curled around his brain, another around his heart, the third turned to liquid and sliding through his veins.
At Browick, he said, teacher-student romances were known to happen from time to time, but he’d never had one because, before me, he’d never had the desire. I was the first student who put the thought in his head. There was something about me that made it worth the risk. I had an allure that drew him in.
It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him. Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could talk to me, confide in me. Lurking deep within me, he said, was a dark romanticism, the same kind he saw within himself. No one had ever understood that dark part of him until I came along.
“It’s just my luck,” he said, “that when I finally find my soul mate, she’s fifteen years old.”
“If you want to talk about luck,” I countered, “try being fifteen and having your soul mate be some old guy.”
He checked my face after I said this to make sure I was joking—of course I was. I wanted nothing to do with boys my own age, their dandruff and acne, how cruel they could be, cutting girls up into features, rating our body parts on a scale of one to ten. I wasn’t made for them. I loved Strane’s middle-aged caution, his slow courtship. He compared my hair to the color of maple leaves, slipped poetry into my hands—Emily, Edna, Sylvia. He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air. He loved me so much that sometimes after I left his classroom, he lowered himself into my chair and rested his head against the seminar table, trying to breathe in what was left of me. All of that happened before we even kissed. He was careful with me. He tried so hard to be good.
It’s easy to pinpoint when it all started, that moment of walking into his sun-soaked classroom and feeling his eyes drink me in for the first time, but it’s harder to know when it ended, if it really ended at all. I think it stopped when I was twenty-two, when he said he needed to get himself together and couldn’t live a decent life while I was within reach, but for the past decade there have been late-night calls, him and me reliving the past, worrying the wound we both refuse to let heal.
I assume I’ll be the one he turns to in ten or fifteen years, whenever his body begins to break down. That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.
I get out of work at eleven and move through the empty downtown streets, counting each block I walk without checking Taylor’s post as a personal victory. In my apartment, I still don’t look at my phone. I hang up my work suit, take off my makeup, smoke a bowl in bed, and turn off the light. Self-control.
But in the dark, something shifts within me as I feel the bedsheets slide across my legs. Suddenly, I’m full of need—to be reassured, to hear him say, plainly, that of course he didn’t do what that girl says he did. I need him to say again that she’s lying, that she was a liar ten years ago and is a liar still, taken in now by the siren song of victimhood.
He answers halfway through the first ring, as though expecting me to call. “Vanessa.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s late.” I balk then, unsure how to ask for what I want. It’s been so long since we last did this. My eyes travel the dark room, taking in the outline of the open closet door,