I felt so extraordinary that semester. We all did, I’m sure, the litany of young women; that was how he maintained these things. He would argue philosophy with us. This brilliant, award-winning academic! He’d listen and raise his eyebrows, lean back, take off his glasses, and then, incredibly, concede the point. And we—well, I anyway—felt like a bright spark. A future contributor to Great Western Thought.

I was young, briefly happy in the way that you’d hope all young people get to be happy. Yes, my happiness was contingent upon gross ethical misdeeds, but life had opened for me. I was able to ask myself the same questions I always had but with no sense of impending doom attached. Instead of lying in my bed, listening to Mom and Gran arguing about my welfare out in the living room, I could drown out the noise of it with endless philosophical questions: Why was I born? If I died, would everyone be happier? What good could I do, even as a grown-up, that would cancel out the death of my father? How do you measure that good? I could now write entire essays. How do you define a life well lived? What does it mean to be moral? What is the worth of an individual life? What do you owe to your family, to your community, to yourself?

I was onto something, I thought. My questions weren’t being answered, not even close, not even after my master’s thesis was published in a reputable journal, but the questions I was arriving at were sharper, more crucial. I was becoming wiser, more morally conscientious, while I was sleeping with my married professor, and at the time I did not, in fact, realize how ironic that was.

It ended at a campus Starbucks on a Thursday morning, three of us catching up at a corner table between the undergrad classes we were teaching, cracking jokes about what it took to get tenure—for some reason, this is the most painful part of the memory, those jokes—when the dean of our college passed the window, spotted us, stopped walking, and doubled back.

The moment Michael’s wife changed direction, I knew the vague shape of what was coming, if not the force of it. I knew I deserved a reckoning. Given that, you’d think I would have been better prepared to weather it.

After the confrontation—loud, detailed—there was a blessed shocked beat before humiliation flash-flooded, during which I wondered why the hell she didn’t leave him. Why keep accepting the same fate, over and over? When she left the Starbucks, so did my colleagues, not friends, I realized later, not with their academic careers on the line, and I left too, the campus, academia, the world of the living.