Make Me Leave

Mira’s POV

The faculty restroom on the third floor of the humanities building is the only place in this entire university where no one can find me.

No tenure-track colleagues with their performative sympathy. No department chair asking if I need "a few more days" with that careful voice people use when they're already calculating how to redistribute your course load. Vivian's funeral was three days ago. The woman who raised me, who loved me when my own blood couldn't be bothered — gone. And the world just kept spinning like it hadn't lost the best person in it.

I lock myself in the last stall and press my spine against cold tile. Five minutes. That's all I need.

Then I hear it — a moan from two stalls down. Low, breathy, building. A masculine grunt that bounces off porcelain.

My skin prickles and my teeth clench at the same time. Seven years since hands that weren't my own touched me with any kind of intent — and after that came a pregnancy, a newborn, a PhD to finish, and a career to claw together on four hours of sleep. Romance wasn't something I gave up. It just never made the priority list between diapers and dissertation deadlines.

You have got to be kidding me.

My heels crack against the floor like gunshots. The stall door isn't even locked — I push it open and there he is. Tyler Weston. Junior. Trust fund. Legacy admission his father's donations secured before the kid could spell his own name. Belt hanging open, a freshman girl clutching her blouse to her chest, mascara already streaking.

"Professor Holloway—" she starts, voice splintering.

"Get dressed. Go to your next class." Flat, clinical. The same voice I use for plagiarism hearings. "We'll talk tomorrow during office hours."

She bolts. Tyler doesn't flinch. Just works his belt buckle with the lazy confidence of someone who's never faced a consequence money couldn't erase.

"She was into it," he says. "Figured you'd want to know."

"I don't. Get out."

"Come on, Professor." He tilts his head, studying me the way rich boys study things they think they own. "You're wound tighter than my grandmother's pearls."

"You're in a women's restroom during my only free hour. Get to class before I file a formal report with the Dean."

His gaze drops. Slow. Deliberate. Down my blouse, my waist, my hips. Taking inventory like he's pricing livestock.

"My father donated the building you teach in. You really want to make an enemy out of a Weston?" That smirk — the one his father probably taught him over golf. "I think the issue is you haven't been bent over your own desk in so long you forgot what it feels like. That kind of frustration makes women mean."

He's out the door before I can respond. Even spoiled boys learn when to retreat.

My hands won't stop shaking. I grip the sink until my knuckles go bloodless. The worst part isn't the vulgarity — I teach eighteen-year-olds about the Roman Empire, I've heard worse. The worst part is standing in this fluorescent-lit bathroom knowing he's not entirely wrong about the loneliness.

The drive home takes twenty-two minutes. Elliot fills every second from his booster seat — the caterpillar his class found at recess, the tower he built that was taller than Marcus's, the injustice of being forced to eat carrots when applesauce existed.

"And then Mrs. Dunlap said the caterpillar would turn into a butterfly, but I said maybe it'll turn into a moth because not everything turns into what people expect, right Mama?"

"Right, baby." My knuckles are white on the steering wheel. He doesn't notice. Six-year-olds live in a merciful country where mothers are indestructible.

Hartwell House appears at the end of the drive the way it always does — patient, solid, older than anyone alive to remember its first owners. Every mirror inside draped with black cloth because Vivian believed the old ways mattered.

Cars crowd the gravel. Too many. My stomach drops.

The will reading. I forgot about the will reading.

"Mama, why are all these cars here?"

"They're here because of Grandma Viv." I unbuckle him, smooth his hair — dark like mine, unruly like it has its own agenda. "People need to find out what she wanted done with her things."

"Do we have to leave?" Green eyes fixed on the front door — both of them, technically, though the left one has never been purely green. In certain light it catches amber, warm and unmistakable, a secret hiding in plain sight. Six years old and already bracing for the answer adults can't give.

My chest folds in on itself. "Whatever happens, you and me — we figure it out. That's the deal, remember?"

He nods. Slides his hand into mine. We walk in together.

The house is crawling with strangers. Distant relatives picking at finger sandwiches I made at five this morning while my son slept. Not one of them looks at me. To them I've always been the help's daughter who somehow never left.

Then a sound from outside — not the polite hum of sedans, but something lower. Engineered. Obscene.

A black car slides up the drive. The door opens and Dominic Langley steps out, and seven years collapse into a single heartbeat.

My hands find the windowsill because my knees have forgotten their purpose. He's in a suit that costs more than my semester salary — not the boy I remember but the CEO the magazines can't stop profiling.

Broader now. Jaw sharper. And those eyes — one green, one amber — the kind of mismatched gaze that made tabloid photographers fight for close-ups and made a twenty-one-year-old girl believe anything he said.

I watch him accept condolences from relatives he's never met, shaking hands with practiced grief. Seven years. Not one visit. Not one call when Vivian got sick, when she stopped being able to feed herself, when she died in the bedroom upstairs with my hand in hers and his name on her lips.

He looks up. Our eyes catch across the foyer and for one nauseating second I'm twenty-one again, standing in his grandmother's kitchen at midnight, believing every word.

I give him nothing. Not a smile, not a flinch. He looks away first. Good.

The lawyer herds everyone into the study. Elliot's upstairs with Harold. I stand in the back with my arms crossed while small bequests trickle out — a painting, a library donation, Harold's cottage secured for life.

Then the house.