Love in the Time of Serial Killers(88)

“Shani and I were thinking maybe we could move in,” Conner said. “We’d take over the payments, of course, and do what we need to in order to make everything right with creditors or your share or whatever. It’d be cheaper than our rent on an apartment now. And there’d be no need to repaint the room, because it’s kinda perfect for a gaming space with all that darkness.”

“You’re going to turn my childhood bedroom into a gaming space?”

“At least I didn’t say man cave,” Conner said. “What do you think?”

Everything he said made sense. At the start of the summer, I’d assumed that Conner felt the same way about the house that I had—that it was filled with bad memories and not a place he’d ever care to return. But staying there even for a few months had shown me that it was just four walls and a roof and a few doors that were so swollen from humidity they didn’t shut all the way anymore. If it could help him and Shani on their new life together, then I was happy for them to live there.

Except one thing. “Oh god,” I said. “You’re going to be neighbors with Sam.”

“Yeah . . .” Conner said. “Awkward. I take it you haven’t talked since you left?”

There had been one night, when I’d been feeling really low and I’d reached for my phone and I would’ve definitely sent Sam a text, ranging from anything as innocuous as a hey to as thirsty as a cute selfie I’d “accidentally” forward. Not that I would stoop to such tactics.

If I had his phone number. I realized that we’d never actually exchanged that information—we hadn’t needed to. He was always right there, one knock away.

“Have you seen him?” I asked now, hoping my voice sounded casual.

“The other day, briefly,” Conner said, then seemed to hesitate. “There was, uh, a girl with him. He introduced her as something like Gem, Gemma, I can’t remember.”

I knew that pretty clerk at the music store was into him. “Jewel.”

“That was it!” Conner was quiet for a minute, Shani’s voice coming through in the background. “Shani said I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

Only, holy shit did it matter, because for days afterward it was all I could think about. I’d never been a particularly jealous person, but the idea of Sam with another woman made me literally sick to my stomach. Every night I slept in his LAUNCH INTO LEARNING! T-shirt and red boxer briefs that I’d purposefully never returned. It was all completely unlike me.

The week of my dissertation defense finally rolled around, and that at least was back in my comfort zone. It was what I’d prepared for the last five and a half years, and I couldn’t allow my focus to wander now.

I had one more meeting scheduled with Dr. Nilsson, although she’d assured me it was just a formality to go through a few last things about the structure of the defense. I’d turned in my conclusion and revised all the previous chapters based on her initial notes, and I knew the dissertation itself was in pretty good shape.

“Who’s going to be there on Thursday?” she said toward the end of the meeting, when I thought we’d wrapped everything up. I wanted to say, Hopefully, you and the rest of my committee? but could tell she wanted more from my answer. I just didn’t know what.

“Family, friends,” she clarified. “You can invite anyone you’d like for the first part. It can be a nice way to show all the people who’ve supported you in this journey what you’ve been working toward. We know that doctorates aren’t earned alone.”

“A lot of people from the department should be there,” I said. Some of them I considered friends, although I realized I’d spent the last few years focused on my work, and not really taking a lot of time for extracurricular friendships. The truth was that I had been alone, for a while. But it had always been the way I liked it, where I called all the shots and I was responsible only to myself. It had never felt lonely.

Now, suddenly it did.

“Mmm,” Dr. Nilsson said. And I should’ve dropped it, but something about the way she hummed that syllable, a judgment I sensed there, made me bristle.

“You’re the one who said I should keep my options open,” I said. “Right? Not get too tied down in one place or with one person, keep myself flexible so I could be more marketable for academic jobs?”

She blinked at me, as if she were genuinely taken aback by the vehemence of my question. Probably she was. I doubted she even remembered having that conversation, but it had stuck in my head ever since.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “That’s true, to an extent. It can be a nomadic road at first, trying to find a tenure-track position that is the right fit for you. And I won’t sugarcoat it—the market is more competitive than ever. But I apologize if I gave you the impression that you couldn’t have relationships. This can be a hard road, too, and sometimes those connections are what you need to get through it. My parents flew all the way from Sweden to see my defense.”

“Really?”

“Many years ago,” she said wryly. “They didn’t understand any of it. But it meant a lot to me, to look out at the people in that room and see their faces there.”

I had the absurd impulse to make a joke, something about imagining people in their underwear when you get nervous. But I couldn’t workshop it in my head fast enough—for the best, considering that Dr. Nilsson was not generally known for her sense of humor. Instead I just sat there like a potato, still trying to wrap my head around the soft expression on Dr. Nilsson’s face when she thought back to her family’s support decades earlier.