The Tutor and the Senator's Widow novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Her Own Name

Eleanor came to Floyd Avenue on Friday night, climbed my four flights, and did not take off her coat.

"I have written to the Graduate Council," she said.

She stood in the middle of my one room, between the bed and the hot plate, holding a letter in both hands.

"What did you write?"

"That the tutoring has ended. That there was never a financial arrangement after the first month. That I have no further contact with you." She swallowed.

"That the entire matter is my doing."

"Eleanor."

"If I am out of your life, there is nothing for them to hold a hearing about."

I stared at her.

She was forty-one years old, tall as a doorway in her boots.

She was shaking.

"You're breaking up with me," I said.

"I'm protecting you."

"By leaving."

"By removing the one thing they can use." She put the letter on my desk.

"Sam, I am a headline now. My face has been on the six o'clock news. If they put you next to me, you will be the girl who slept with the senator's widow, in every database, forever. I am not going to spend your whole career on that."

"You think I didn't know that at your dining table?"

"You were twenty-two and flattered."

"I was twenty-two and furious," I said.

That stopped her.

"I was furious that a woman with pearls and a chandelier looked at me as if I were the smartest person she had ever met," I said.

"I'd never been looked at like that. I wanted to be looked at like that for the rest of my life, and I didn't care what it cost."

"Sam..."

"No, listen. You made decisions for yourself for the first time in seventeen years. You put down the pencil. You got to be a person who says no to Lowell." My voice cracked.

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