“I know,” I say quietly, unable to look her in the eye. “I know.”
“You worked so hard,” she says.
“I know.”
Before she can say anything else, there’s a knock on my front door. I open it and Oliver’s there, wearing a black coat with a green scarf, and he nods at me once.
“Thanks for inviting me to your strategy meeting,” he says, as I usher him inside. “Hope I can be of some —”
He stops, just for a second, looking down the hall at where my mom is leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen, saying something to Seth inside.
“ —use,” he finishes, then shrugs his coat off. Underneath he’s got on a fairly tame shirt, compared to some of the things I’ve seen him wear, though his shoes are a startling shade of blue.
“That’s the idea,” I say, taking his coat and scarf, but he’s already walking down the hall.
“You must be Caleb’s mom,” he says, holding out a hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“You must be his advisor,” I hear her say. “Clara Loveless.”
“Oliver Nguyen.”
“Be honest,” my mom says as I close the closet door. “How bad has he fucked up?”
Oliver just sighs.
“Bad,” he says.* * *“So they never get better?” my mom asks, sitting next to me on the couch.
“NSF grant applications? No, I think they get worse,” Oliver says, sitting on a chair across from my mom. “I swear they add three pages of nonsense for you to fill out every year. Why do they need to know what the highest-paid employee at my institution is? Not my fault the football coach makes a pile of money.”
“I was hoping that maybe if I did this for long enough everything would just click into place,” my mom says, gesturing into the air. “Ten years, maybe fifteen.”
“I wish,” Oliver says, and my mom laughs.
Just then, Seth comes into the living room, carrying a tray with four cups of Earl Grey, a few cookies, and some grapes. I didn’t know I had any of those things in my house, but leave it to Seth to find them and present them nicely to the rest of us.
“Thanks,” I say, as he takes a seat, and we all lean forward for our tea, silence hanging heavy in the air between us.
Finally, Oliver clears his throat.
“I spoke with my colleague on the ethics committee,” he says.
I can already tell it’s bad news. Good news comes out immediately. Bad news waits.
“And?” I ask.
“They were sent a short video,” he says.
My stomach drops. I put my tea back on the coffee table and lean my elbows on my knees, rubbing my hands together.
The organ concert, I think, a sharp prickle working its way down my spine. The library. That time in my office. God, how thorough was I about closing the curtains when we were here?
If someone has footage of Thalia naked without her consent I’m going to fucking kill them.
“What’s on the video?” I ask, my voice surprisingly steady.
“It’s you and — sorry…”
“Thalia,” I supply, my voice tight.
“You and Thalia kissing next to a minivan,” he says. “Apparently you’re in some parking lot, but it’s quite clearly you and pretty unmistakable what you’re doing.”
I close my eyes and sigh with relief. I’m pretty sure everyone sighs with relief, though when I open my eyes, Seth is smirking at me.
I wait for Oliver to look away, and I flip him off as subtly as I can.
Then, suddenly, I realize what Oliver just said.
Parking lot.
Minivan.
That really, really narrows down who the reporter could have been.
“Can he say it’s Photoshopped?” Seth asks. “Academia’s cutthroat, maybe someone wants him fired.”
“It’s a video,” Oliver says.
“You can edit videos,” Seth says. “Right now, the technology exists to make very convincing deep fakes. Just last week I saw a video that someone had made of the President saying —”
“It’s not fake,” I point out.
“Yes, I know,” Seth says, in his most patient you are a moron voice. “But can you convince people that it’s fake?”
“Seth,” my mom says sharply.
“We’re talking about a whole committee of people who know what Occam’s Razor is,” I say. “And the simplest explanation is clearly —”
“That’s actually not what Occam’s Razor says,” Seth interrupts. “Occam’s Razor states that the solution that makes the fewest assumptions is likely to be correct, not the simplest.”
“That’s accurate,” confirms Oliver.
I shift position, flopping backward onto my couch and covering my face with my hands.
“But I take your point,” Seth concedes, sipping his tea.
I sit there, quietly, trying to think, but my brain feels like a disused path through the dense forest, like I’m hacking through kudzu and tripping over fallen trees every three feet just to get a single thought together.
“So it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to deny that the affair happened,” my mom chimes in, ever pragmatic. Clearly, Seth got it from somewhere.