CHAPTER 16
Victoria Langdon Sees Him
She had told herself, after the first sighting in the quad, that it was grief. That grief did this—constructed familiar faces from the material of strangers, assembled the particular set of features that the mind most missed and applied them to whatever was available.
She had read about this phenomenon. It was documented. It had a name, she believed, in the clinical literature. It was a normal part of the process.
She had told herself this with considerable conviction and had mostly believed it.
The second time was in the library.
She had been working at a table on the second floor, mid-afternoon, surrounded by the pleasant ambient pressure of other people working.
She had been cross-referencing two sources — a case study in Swiss succession law from 2018 and a comparative analysis of sovereign immunity frameworks across twelve jurisdictions.
She had looked up, as you do when you have been reading for too long, just to let her eyes rest on something that was not text.
He was at a table near the south windows. Side-on to her. Not looking in her direction. Reading something that she couldn't identify from the distance, with the quality of attention — she stopped thinking, because it was the quality of attention she recognized. Specific to him.
The deep-water stillness of someone for whom reading was not passive intake but active engagement, a conversation between him and the text.
She looked at her table. Looked back. He was still there. Real and solid and undeniably, impossibly present.
She had picked up her bag and left the floor. She had gone down the back stairs, not the main exit, and sat in the library café on the ground level for twenty minutes with a tea she did not drink.
She had then returned to her apartment and sat on her bed in the specific way that is not resting but is rather the body's method of giving the mind the physical stability it needs to process something large.
She had told herself: it is the same face on a different person. It happens. You're in a new place, you're working on material that connects to the past, you're more vulnerable than you realize.
She had believed this with decreasing conviction.
— ◆ —
The third time, she stopped lying to herself.
It was a Wednesday evening. She was walking back from the economics building with a colleague .
A pleasant woman named Dr. Marsh who was doing comparative work in regulatory policy, who had the academic conversationalist's talent for talking productively while also going places.
They were moving along the central campus path, arguing amiably about the relationship between regulatory capture and institutional trust, and Victoria was laughing at something Dr. Marsh had said when they rounded the corner of the Alderton building and she looked up and saw him.
Fifteen meters. Full-frontal. Clear light. He was crossing the path in the direction of the east buildings, canvas jacket, hands in his pockets, head slightly angled toward the ground in the way she had always thought of as his thinking-while-walking posture — the physical expression of someone following a thread of thought through a mental space.
He did not look up. He passed and kept going and disappeared around the curve of the path and was gone in eight seconds.
"Victoria?" Dr. Marsh said.
She realized she had stopped walking. She was standing in the middle of the path with her bag strap in both hands and her face doing something she could not control.
"Sorry," she said. "Sorry — I thought I saw someone." She started walking again. "What were you saying about regulatory frameworks?".
Dr. Marsh said something. Victoria heard it and responded to it and maintained the thread of the conversation for the remaining three minutes it took them to part at the building entrance, and she was proud, in a distant way, of how well she managed those three minutes. She had always been good at continuity. It was both a strength and a way of avoiding things.
She went to her apartment. She did not sit down. She stood in the middle of her main room with her coat still on and her bag still on her shoulder and she looked at the photograph of the Thames on her desk and she thought, very clearly and without softening it in any direction: that was him.
She did not know what this meant. She did not know if he had seen her, or knew she was there, or what the correct action was in the face of a thing you had spent three years believing was permanent revealing itself to be provisional. She did not know if she was frightened or relieved or furious or — and this was the possibility she spent the longest time with — whether all of these were the same feeling, and what you were supposed to do when they were.
She took off her coat. She hung it on the hook by the door. She sat at her desk and opened her laptop and pulled up the Harrington University directory and searched, with the specific and terrible precision of someone who has finally decided to know something, for the name she hadn't said aloud in three years.
The directory returned one result.
VOSS, ETHAN M. — Second Year, Economics and Political Science. Office hours: by appointment. Housing: not listed.
She stared at the entry for a long time.
Then she closed the laptop. She looked at the photograph of the Thames. She thought about the shape of the moment on the highway in Zurich, and the phone call, and the forms she had signed, and the scholarship endowment from a foundation whose name she now understood differently than she had at twenty-two.
She was going to have to do something. She knew this. She simply wasn't sure, yet, what the doing-something looked like, or whether she was the one who got to decide.