The Professor's Captive Wife novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Couch

The department chair rang our doorbell at nine on Monday morning.

I answered it in my socks with a mixing bowl under my arm.

He stood on the step in his bow tie and a raincoat, holding his hat against his chest.

"Mrs. Thaxter. I'm so sorry to come to the house."

"You're not here to fire him, are you?"

"Good Lord, no. I don't have the authority. I'd have done it by email." He blinked. "That was a joke."

"I know. It was a good one. Come in."

Eliot was at the kitchen table with a stack of essays and his reading glasses on.

He stood up when he saw who it was.

The chair didn't take off his raincoat.

He put an envelope on the table between the essays and the butter dish.

"The endowed chair," he said. "In the nineteenth-century novel. The committee voted for you in September. The letter was supposed to go out last week."

I set the mixing bowl down.

Eliot hadn't told me.

Of course he hadn't.

"It's still yours," the chair said. "The trustees' office called me last night. If you sign a statement before the gala, the deception charge goes away."

"What statement?" I asked.

The chair looked at me, then at his hat.

"That the correspondence was a private arrangement between spouses. That Mrs. Thaxter knew who she was writing to all along."

The kitchen went very quiet.

I understood it about one second after Eliot did.

If I'd known all along, my letters weren't a lonely woman telling the truth to a stranger.

They were a game.

Every person who'd read them would read them again with a smirk.

And Theresa would have cut one more recording without lifting a finger.

Eliot didn't look at me.

He took the envelope off the table and handed it back to the chair unopened.

"No," he said.

"Eliot, think for one minute."

"I've thought about it for a week." Eliot took off his reading glasses. "My wife didn't know. I'm not going to say she did so I can keep an office with a fireplace."

"It's not only the office. It's the research money, the leave, the..."

"I know what it is." His voice was very quiet. "Please withdraw my name from the chair as well."

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