Jake drove straight to Bob Rogers’s office. The electrical engineering department’s secretary looked harried and drawn as she sat at her desk, phone to her ear. She half rose from her chair and held up a hand to stop Jake.

“Professor Rogers is in conference with the heads of the—”

Jake brushed right past her and strode down the hall to Rogers’s office. The poor woman watched, open-mouthed, the phone still in her hand.

Rogers wasn’t in his office, but Jake heard voices from farther down the hall, coming from the conference room. He walked to the door. Rogers was sitting with half a dozen older men and women: Jake recognized the university’s top brass, deans and administrators. Rogers saw Jake and raised a cautionary finger. Jake retreated back to the physicist’s office and waited there.

About fifteen minutes later Rogers came into the office, looking dismal. The others from the meeting paraded past the open office door, equally grim-faced.

“Well,” Rogers said as he slid into his desk chair, “I’m now the dean of the electrical engineering department, pro tem.”

“What happened?” Jake asked, dropping into one of the steel-framed chairs in front of the desk.

“They elected me to run the department,” Rogers said, his face still gray, bleak. “For the time being. Until—”

“No. I mean what happened to Sinclair?”

Rogers shook his head. “Lord knows. I never took him for the kind that commits suicide.”

“And his wife?”

“I don’t know. I met her once a few years ago. She seemed like a nice enough person.”

“This is terrible,” said Jake.

“It’s a shock.”

That’s when the realization hit Jake. It’s my fault! If I hadn’t gone up to Vernon, if I hadn’t confronted Sinclair about his wife …

My fault. All my fault.

Rogers was talking but Jake barely heard the words. The enormity of his responsibility felt like an immense weight pressing down on him, making it hard to breathe.

He struggled to his feet, made some lame words to Rogers, and tottered out of the office, past the same secretary, who gave him a vicious stare, and out into the cold, snow-covered quadrangle.

By the time Jake got to his office, Glynis Colwyn was standing at his locked door. She looked blazingly angry.

“There you are,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Jake as he unlocked the door. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

He ushered Glynis into his tiny office. She was wearing a heavy gray turtleneck sweater and faded jeans tucked into fur-trimmed black boots beneath a leather thigh-length coat, which hung open.

Jake gestured to the office’s only spare chair as he leaned tiredly on the edge of his desk.

“I know this is all my fault,” he began. “I feel awful about it.”

“Your fault?” She looked up sharply at him.

“You were right,” he said, feeling wretched. “I pushed him too far.”