All eyes were on Dani as she entered the party, but for once it wasn’t because of her status as the jilted wife of the inexplicably popular Professor Vincent Ricci, who had left her for a twenty-year-old named Berkeley.

Or it wasn’t only because of that. To be fair, it probably started because of that. Vince and Berkeley coming out as a couple a hot minute after Berkeley dropped out of school was the biggest news to hit the department since the dean’s office repossessed the humanities’ faculty lounge and gave it to the economists for an econometrics lab. Somehow, even though Vince had undergone an ethics investigation because of concerns he’d broken the rule about, oh, not dating students—and had been cleared because there was no proof he and Berkeley had gotten together until after Berkeley dropped out—Dani seemed to be the subject of most of the departmental gossip. Poor, discarded Dani, replaced by a younger, tauter model.

And now Vince and Berkeley were back from their Spanish adventure for a couple of weeks. What would Dani do? What would she say? How would she act?

But it only took a second, once everyone got a load of Max, for the narrative to shift.

Because Max, in his dukeish casual, looked a lot more than “fine,” especially in contrast to the men in this crowd, who were “dressed up” in their Dockers and no-iron shirts that actually needed ironing. Max’s tallness and slimness was accentuated by the tailored blue suit he was wearing like a second skin. Like it was casual. With his icy-blue eyes, his dirty-blond hair styled almost in a pompadour, and his angular face, he looked like that Swedish actor from that vampire show, all sharp edges and cool cobalt.

He must have noticed everyone’s attention—it was hard not to, as this group was not subtle. He laid his palm on her lower back. He didn’t press or push, just stood serenely while everyone gaped at them. In any other circumstance, she would have shaken him off, but she performed a quick mental cost-benefit analysis and decided that having a baron get a little handsy wasn’t the worst look right now. After a few beats of silence, of posing, really, while everyone stared, he said, “Shall we go to the bar?”

Dani made eye contact with Sinéad, her closest friend in the department. Sinéad and Dani had been hired a year apart and had leaned on each other a lot in the early going, forming a kind of battlefield bond that had never gone away even as they’d found their stride and gotten busy with research and relationships.

So busy, apparently, that Dani hadn’t laid eyes on Sinéad all semester outside of departmental meetings. How had that happened? Dani had been working a lot lately, but still. They used to go for drinks almost weekly. Before Vince.