“Yes. Sorry.” She gave a small, awkward smile. “I didn’t mean?—”
“I know,” I said.
And I did. That was the problem. She hadn’t meant anything by it, not really. She was just curious, repeating what she’d heard. Trying to make sense of it, like anyone would. She gathered her things and left, the door closing behind her.
I stood there for a moment longer, the empty room settling around me, my skin cold as ice.
There’d been no accusations or confrontation, only the quiet understanding that something had been said, somewhere, by someone?—
And that it hadn’t entirely disappeared.
It lingered, not in facts but in perception. And no matter how confidentIwas in the truth, that didn’t mean everyone else would be.
I dragged a hand over my face before reaching for my notes. There was nothing I could do about it, not directly. It would take a while to challenge the rumours, and in the meantime I would teach, be consistent, and let time heal all things.
I’d done nothing wrong. I knew that. Karl knew that. Diana knew that.
And that would have to be enough.
But as I left the room and stepped back into the corridor, feeling the shift in atmosphere I couldn’t quite prove but couldn’t ignore either, I realised something else.
Even if everything here returned to normal, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to.
One afternoon, I stopped mid-sentence during a lecture, the words simply trailing off as something else caught hold of my attention, not something in the room but in my head. A memory. A different rhythm.
I recovered quickly. No one seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn’t comment.
But I noticed. That was the problem.
I started pausing more, letting students play longer than I normally would. Watching them instead of listening, my thoughts drifting—not randomly, not unfocused, but in a very specific direction.
Always the same one.
Berlin.
Those thoughts never arrived fully formed, but in pieces. A street, a sound, the way a room had felt.
And him.
It wasn’t overwhelming, but consistent enough that I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there.
Stefan.
I didn’t say his name out loud, not at first, but it was there all the same, sitting beneath everything else, threading through mythoughts in a way that made the rest of my life feel out of sync. Something I tried to ignore, and for a while, I managed it.
I didn’t check my phone constantly. Days would pass where I barely thought about it, where I moved through lectures, meetings, practice sessions with the same steady focus I’d always had.
But then there would be a pause. A gap. A moment where my hand hovered for a fraction too long before unlocking the screen.
Nothing.
No message.
No missed call.
No indication that anything I’d left behind in Berlin had followed me here.
I told myself that was exactly how it should be, that it made sense. Stefan wasn’t the kind of man who reached out without knowing why. He didn’t do uncertainty. He didn’t act unless he understood what it meant.