The department of physics at Calhoun University occupied the fourth and fifth floors of Alderman Hall, a building constructed in the optimistic brutalist tradition of the 1970s, which is to say it was composed almost entirely of raw concrete and institutional ambition and had not aged especially well on either count.

Roman had worked here for twenty-three years. He knew the particular acoustics of the stairwell, the specific location of the radiator on the fourth floor corridor that knocked every twelve minutes between October and March, and the precise angle at which the afternoon light came through the seminar room windows in a way that made it nearly impossible to read the board, a problem he had reported to facilities management in 2015 and expected to die before seeing resolved.

He had been coming in since October. This was what he told himself, and it was technically true in the same way that a man can be technically present at a dinner party while spending the entire evening rearranging his fork. He had lectured. He had held office hours, sitting behind his desk while students filed in and out with their questions, which he had answered with the automatic precision of a man running on a program someone else had written. He had attended one departmental meeting, during which his colleague Dr. Farida Osei had passed him a note that said you don't have to be here and he had written back I am aware and she had looked at him for a long moment and let it go, because Farida was a woman of considerable intelligence and had understood, correctly, that there was nothing useful to be said.

He had not, in any meaningful sense, been there.

But he had been in the building, which was something, which was what he had managed, and the department had arranged itself around his diminished presence with the tactful efficiency of people who understood that a man of Roman's particular disposition needed to be handled the way you handled a stripped screw: with patience, and the correct tool, and the knowledge that forcing it would only make things worse.

The situation with the student presented itself on a Tuesday morning in the third week of November.

It was three days after he had lain down in his own bedroom for the first time in months and which was, though Roman would not have described it in these terms, the first week in which he had arrived at Alderman Hall and noticed that the building still smelled of chalk dust and radiator heat and the coffee that the departmental secretary Mrs. Antonova brewed each morning with a devotion that bordered on liturgical.

The student's name was Priya Mehta. She was twenty-two years old, in the second year of her doctoral program, and she had been assigned to Roman's supervision in September by the department in what he now understood had been a minor act of either optimism or administrative oversight, he wasn't entirely sure which.

She had, in the intervening two months, sent him four emails of escalating precision, each one more carefully worded than the last, each one asking for a supervision meeting with the controlled patience of someone who had been told the situation and was doing their level best to be understanding about it while also, not unreasonably, needing to complete a doctorate.

He had replied to none of them. This was, he was aware, not his finest hour professionally.

On Tuesday morning she knocked on his office door.

"Come in," Roman said.

She was small and very upright, with the alert, slightly compressed energy of someone who thought quickly and had learned to wait for the room to catch up. She carried a laptop and a notebook and an expression of such carefully managed neutrality that Roman recognized it immediately as the face of a person who had prepared extensively for the possibility that this meeting might go badly.

"Professor Kerr," she said. "I'm Priya Mehta. I've been emailing."

"You have," Roman agreed. "Sit down, please."

She sat. She opened her laptop with a decisive click. "I wanted to talk to you about my research direction, if that's all right. I know you've had —" she paused, choosing her words with visible care, "— a difficult few months, and I don't want to impose, but I'm at a point where I genuinely need some guidance and I wasn't sure who else to ask."

Roman, who had been preparing to conduct this meeting on the same autopilot that had carried him through the previous seven weeks, looked at her across the desk.

"What is your research direction?" he said.

She turned the laptop to face him.

What was on the screen was a set of equations that Roman had not seen before.

"Walk me through it," he said, and his voice had a different quality in it than it had possessed for some months, a quality that Farida Osei, passing in the corridor outside and hearing it through the door, would later describe to her husband over dinner as Roman sounding, for the first time since September, like Roman.

Priya walked him through it.

It took forty minutes, during which Roman asked eleven questions, interrupted her twice, got up to write something on the whiteboard, stared at what he'd written for a while in silence, and sat back down.

The problem she had brought him was genuinely hard, which was, he was discovering, exactly what he needed; something that could not be gotten through on autopilot, that required him to be in the room in a way the last seven weeks had not.

Grief, he was finding, was perfectly happy to share the space with a difficult equation.

"Come back Thursday," Roman said eventually. "Bring everything you have. We'll see where it leads."

Priya looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't quite read. Then she closed her laptop and said, simply, "Thank you, Professor Kerr," with a sincerity so unadorned it curled itself around his chest before he could redirect it.

After she left he sat in his office for a while without doing anything in particular. The radiator knocked in the corridor. The afternoon light came through the window at its unhelpful angle, throwing a bright, useless stripe across the far wall.

Roman looked at the equations still on his whiteboard and felt something he recognized, distantly, as the sensation of his own mind being inhabited again after a long vacancy. It was not comfortable exactly. It was the feeling of a room being aired out, slightly cold, slightly sharp, carrying the faint promise of being liveable again once the temperature had had a chance to adjust.

He had a supervision meeting on Thursday. He had something to prepare for.

He put on his coat, turned off the office light, and walked down the corridor past the knocking radiator and the departmental noticeboard with its flyers for seminars he had not attended and would perhaps, now, consider attending, and down the stairwell, and out through the front doors of Alderman Hall into the grey November afternoon, where the trees on the quad stood in their stripped winter patience.

The students moved between buildings in their coats with their headphones and their coffee cups, conducting their young, urgent lives with the beautiful, oblivious energy of people who had not yet learned how quickly the constants could change.

Roman stood on the steps for a moment and looked at all of it.

Then he walked to the car park, and drove home, and on the way he stopped at The Daily Grind and bought a pound of coffee beans and when Chloe handed him the bag and offered her professionally sympathetic smile, Roman found that he was able to return something that was, if not quite a real smile, at least a reasonable first draft of one.

"Have a good evening, Chloe," he said.

"You too, Mr. Kerr," she said, and if she noticed the different beans, she was kind enough not to mention it.

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