Cody blinked, taken aback by her fierce retort. “What happened? What’s changed?”

She sat silent for a moment, tapping her pen on the table. Thinking about Jack Dorian and how he’d comforted her, praised her. And she remembered something else he’d said: that any man would count himself lucky to have a woman like her.

“He made the difference,” she said softly. “Professor Dorian.”

“How?”

“He believes in me. No one else ever has.”

“I do, Taryn. I’ve always believed in you,” he said, but Cody was just a friend, the kind of boy who’d be blindly loyal to the end. No, the one opinion she really cared about was Jack Dorian’s.

She wondered if he was thinking about her, just as she was thinking about him.

“I need to work on this project,” she told Cody. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She waited until he left the library before she turned her attention back to her laptop and typed in the name Professor Jack Dorian. Suddenly she was hungry to see his face, hungry to know more about him. She clicked on his faculty profile page. In his photo, which had clearly not been updated in years, he was wearing a tweedy jacket and a tie, and his smile was approachable but bland. She thought of how his green eyes lit up when he laughed, and how silver now streaked the dark hair at his temples. She liked the Jack Dorian she knew now. He might be older than in this photo, and his laugh lines were a little deeper, but what mattered wasn’t his age, only his heart and his soul.

And he’d opened his to her.

She read the faculty profile, committing the details to memory. BA Bowdoin College. PhD Yale. Three years as assistant professor at University of Massachusetts, four years as associate professor at Boston University. Full professor for the last eight years at Commonwealth. Author of two books about literature and society and more than two dozen published articles about topics ranging from universal themes in ancient myths to modern trends in feminist literature. She wanted to read them all, to immerse herself in everything he’d written, so that the next time they met, she could impress him. She scrolled down his long list of publications and came to a sudden halt, her gaze fixed on his personal information.

Spouse: Margaret Dorian.

Of course she knew he was married; she’d seen the gold band on his finger, but somehow she had blocked out that particular detail. She tried to set it aside, but the images were already in her head: Jack driving home. Walking through his front door. His wife waiting to embrace him, kiss him. Or were those images wrong? She thought of the day in class when he’d looked weary and defeated, as if something had gone wrong at home. Maybe his wife wasn’t there to greet him with a kiss. Maybe she was a woman who berated him, belittled him.

Maybe he was desperate for someone who’d make him happy.

She searched online for Margaret Dorian, Boston. It was an unusual enough name, so it was easy to find the right woman. The top three links were all for Margaret Dorian, MD. On Rate My Physician she’d earned a top score, and one patient had written a comment about Dr. Dorian’s compassion and kindly bedside manner. The online Whitepages had the contact details for her medical practice in Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge.

She hopped onto the Mount Auburn website and clicked on the link for Margaret Dorian, MD.

In her photo she was wearing a white doctor’s coat and a smile. She had brown eyes and shoulder-length red hair, and although she was still attractive, Taryn could see signs of middle age creeping into her face, around her eyes, her mouth. While no longer young, she was accomplished, and her patients liked her. Taryn thought of the long hours a doctor must work, the nights, the weekends. Did her husband feel neglected? Did he spend too many nights alone, longing for company?

She went back online to look for their address. It wasn’t hard to find; on the internet, there were no secrets. Google Maps took her right to their Arlington neighborhood, and on street view she could see their house, a two-story white colonial with a front lawn and neatly trimmed shrubs. On the day this street-view photo had been taken, the garage door was open, and a silver sedan was parked inside. On satellite view, she spotted no signs of children on the property—no bikes, no toys, no play set in the backyard. They were childless, which made it all the less messy should they ever split up. Should he meet someone else with whom he’d rather spend the rest of his life.

She returned to the photo of Dr. Margaret Dorian. Still pretty, yes.

But maybe Jack was longing for more.

CHAPTER 21

JACK

“I’d say Taryn Moore’s a shoo-in,” Ray McGuire said. He’d just come out of the grad committee meeting, and he stood in Jack’s doorway, grinning at him. “Her application’s so strong we waived the deadline requirement.”

“That’s great! She’ll be thrilled to hear it.”

“Official acceptance letters don’t go out for another few weeks, but the vote was unanimous. She’s got a three-nine-something GPA. And her letters of recommendation all read like she’s the next Gloria Steinem.”

Jack couldn’t help but feel a bolt of pride. “She’s really psyched about the program.”

“I hope she didn’t apply to Harvard.”

“Nope. Just here. This was her first choice.”

“Excellent. The writing sample she submitted was a paper she wrote for you on The Aeneid. I’m not up on classical scholarship, but it actually looks publishable. An elegant analysis that Virgil’s really telling us, through subtext, that instead of committing suicide, Queen Dido should have thrust that sword into Aeneas.” He laughed. “Kind of a scary take on it, actually.” He turned to leave, then paused. “By the way, if she joins our program, she’ll raise our female hotness average from its current minus five. But I guess that’s not very PC of me to say, eh?”

“You are a superficial sexist pig.”

Ray smiled. “Yeah, and proud of it.”

A day later, Taryn practically danced into Jack’s office.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she burst out and leaned across his desk, her hair spilling over her shoulders, her face aglow.

“I take it you’ve heard some good news?” he said, smiling.

“Yes! Professor McGuire stopped me in the hall just now, and he said it’s almost certainly going to happen!” With a joyful sigh, she dropped into the chair facing his desk. That was how comfortable she’d become with him. They’d spent so much time together discussing her application and her thesis that she now needed no invitation to make herself at home in his office. “And it’s all because of you.”

“Taryn, I wasn’t the one who wrote those papers. Or earned those grades.”

“But you showed me the possibilities. You made me believe in myself.”

Flustered by her praise, he couldn’t think of anything to say. They regarded each other for a moment as he took in the beautiful disarray of her hair, the pink flush of her cheeks. She was more tempting than any Heloise could ever be, and he felt as bewitched as Abelard.

He looked down at his desk, hunting for a distraction, and saw the conference brochure he’d received a few weeks earlier. A welcome change of topic.

“This might interest you,” he said, handing the brochure to her.

“A conference on comparative lit?”

“It’s at the UMass campus in Amherst. Some of these presentations might interest you. Maybe even give you ideas for a future dissertation. Some of the best scholars in your field will be there.”

She studied the session titles he had highlighted. “‘The Invention of Men’?”

“About how classical literature is ultimately the history of men.”

She read the description. “‘Beginning with Homer, male writers and historians have focused only on men, leaving women as mere shadows in history.’” She looked at him. “It’s a talk by Maxine Vogel!”

“So you’re familiar with the name?”

“She’s one of the best-known feminist critics in the world.”

“She recently published a paper very similar to your interpretation of Heloise.”

“Oh my God, I’d love to go. Is it too late to register?”

“I don’t think you’d have a problem getting in.”

“I wonder if there’s bus service to Amherst. Since I don’t have a car.”

“I’m going too. I can drive you and any other students who want to attend. I’ll mention it in class, see if we can drum up some interest.”

She frowned at the conference fees. “Oh. I’d need to pay for a hotel.”

“I’ll check with Ray McGuire to see if he can come up with student travel funds. Especially since there’s a good chance you’ll be joining our grad program.”

She smiled at the brochure. “My first-ever literary conference. I just know I’m going to love it.”

Taryn stood on the edge of the campus quadrangle, where she’d promised to be waiting for him. Even from half a block away, he could spot her slim figure, dressed in dark-pink tights and a black jacket, her hair fluttering in the wind.