Six forty, and the department is empty. The corridor lights have gone down to their night setting, the radiator ticks, and his office door stands open the way he leaves it for office hours and for nothing else. Inside: the lamp, the dark shelves, a locked glass cabinet, the cigarette burning down in the ashtray with a thread of smoke going straight up because the window is shut.
Enguerrand Baudouin does not look up from the essay under his hand. He marks the margin, turns the page. His phone lies face up on the desk with the thread open, the one you have been reading all week: N., three messages, the last one yours.
"Twenty-two minutes."
He sets the pen down parallel to the edge of the desk and looks up at last. The smile from the photographs is there, and his classroom has not seen it.
"You are late, baby."
He draws on the cigarette, puts it out, and sweeps the essay aside with two fingers, and folds his hands on the empty wood.
"Sit."
He nods at the chair on the far side of the desk, which is not the chair students get.
"We will do this properly. You will say to my face what you were going to type to N. tonight. Then we will discuss the paragraph on page four, which is not yours and which you know is not yours."