“What else do you want me to do?” He edged closer to the threshold, revealing his damp torso. She hoped his wealthy neighbors were getting an eyeful.

12... 13...

“You don’t have to do anything else,” Antonia called out in a shaky voice. She kept her eyes planted on the numbers. 14. When the doors slid back, she squeezed herself past them as fast as she could. “Cheating on me is good enough, thank you!”

“Toni...” That was the last thing she heard him say before the elevator doors slowly closed. Antonia decided that was a perfect opportunity to fall against the wall and sob. She wept for fourteen floors. Her phone vibrated in her bag, accompanied by a personalized jingle she’d set for Derek’s calls. She ignored it and continued to weep. Antonia couldn’t pick which part to be most devastated about. There were the lies, the wedding she needed to call off, and the intimate messages that she read. I miss being between your thighs.

As the elevator descended to the third, then second floor, Antonia wiped her face on her jacket. The rest of the day’s makeup was rubbed away to reveal her red and puffy face. She caught herself in the shining reflection of the elevator wall and fought the urge to release another sob. She looked beat up. Her mascara smudged her under eye, her already full lips were swollen. Before hitting the lobby, she tried wiping her eyes again, desperate to move the stubborn black rings. She couldn’t face Derek’s doorman looking like a complete mess.

The doors slid open and she hesitated to leave the elevator. She could go back upstairs. She could talk to him. There could have been a misunderstanding. Maybe she misunderstood everything. Derek had a way of explaining things, maybe this was another thing he could explain away. Am I overreacting?

The doors tried to close during her inner debate. She waved her arm through the opening, sliding them back. What would Augusta do? Her ball-busting heroine, Augusta Sinclair, would have slapped, no, punched, Derek in the face. Antonia had certainly missed that opportunity. But one thing Augusta would never do is return to the scene of the crime. She’d never return to let a man talk his way out of a dick pic. Antonia set her jaw and straightened herself up. Hitching her satchel on her slumped shoulder, she pushed her way forward.

There was no going back.

Chapter Four

“People were bound to have mixed feelings regarding the protagonist of Invisible Man,” Aiden said, turning to the next slide. “And sure, when your main character’s been through the wringer and comes out the other side claiming that he still has possibilities, a segment of your audience is going to call you a liar.”

He tried not to look at Robert, who was sitting in the back of his darkened classroom, as he pressed the clicker. Instead, he focused on the students, some of which he’d lost around the fifth slide of his PowerPoint. The connections he tried to make between Ralph Ellison’s novel and Irish history was lost on many of them, but Aiden continued with the hope that he could articulate ideas for his own scholarship. “But that’s the beauty of hope, isn’t it?” he asked those who were still awake. “It’s the very foundation of an oppressed people, trapped in a system that doesn’t acknowledge them. It’s how you keep going when the man has his boot on your neck.”