The first time Declan Rowan ruined my life, there were four hundred people in the audience and a live stream.
This time, it’s just twenty grad students, a whiteboard, and the smell of burnt coffee.
I sit dead center in the front row of Seminar Room B, laptop open, back straight, every neuron sharpened to a blade. I told myself I’d sit in the second row, fade into the sea of neurotic overachievers. Then his name went up on the course schedule and my spine did this stupid thing where it locked and refused to bend.
Never again, I’d promised myself, standing in that conference hallway two years ago with my printed slides shaking in my hands.
Never again will he see me small.
The door at the back of the room opens on a gust of hallway noise. Conversations stutter, then reform around a new center of gravity.
He’s broader than I remember.
Black button-down, sleeves rolled to just below the elbow, dark grey trousers, no tie. The overhead fluorescents catch in the faint silver beginning at his temples, like the universe decided that of course his hair needed highlights of gravitas. He carries a stack of folders under one arm, a MacBook under the other, moves like he’s counting his own footsteps.
He doesn’t look at me. Of course he doesn’t. The great Declan Rowan doesn’t have to lower himself to acknowledge the girl whose paper he once eviscerated so thoroughly that three people in the audience gasped aloud.
Instead, he crosses to the podium, sets things down in neat, economical motions. The room hushes, that particular reverent silence people reserve for those whose citation counts they’ve memorized.
“Welcome to Computational Linguistics 702,” he says without preamble, voice low and even and unmistakable. “If you’re in the wrong room, you’ll figure it out in about five minutes and wish you’d left sooner.”
A ripple of nervous laughter. I don’t join it. My fingers lie flat on the keyboard, motionless. My chest feels tight in a way that has nothing to do with my too-heavy backpack.
He scans the room—left, right, back. When his eyes pass over me they snag for half a second that stretches itself out, elastic and mean. I watch recognition click, sharpen, then disappear behind something cooler.
“Attendance in this seminar is capped,” he continues. “You’re not here to be spoon-fed. You’re here because, in theory, you can already choke down the basics on your own time.”
Dry, a little cruel. The room eats it up.
I swallow and make my first decision of the semester: I am not going to flinch.
He opens his laptop. The projector wakes in a wash of fan noise and blue light. A title slide appears: PROBABILISTIC MODELS OF MEANING.
Beneath it, in smaller text: Rowan Lab Orientation Session.
That part feels like a punch.
So this is how I meet him as my supervisor. No handshake. No welcome meeting. Just a line of text on a slide and the weightless drop of my stomach.
“If you’ve made it into this room,” he says, “you’ve either been accepted into the Rowan Lab, are on the waiting list, or have wandered in here by sheer force of misdirected confidence.”
More laughter. I hear a whisper to my left.
“That’s him? He’s…younger than I thought.”
Tessa. I know her from the welcome mixer—pink hair in a messy knot, eyeliner like war paint, a laugh that had made the stale cheese cubes almost bearable. She catches my eye now, raises her brows in a silent, exaggerated oh my God.
I should smile. Pretend I’m not one sweat-slick palm away from bolting.
I give her the world’s smallest nod instead.
Declan moves through the orientation with the ruthless efficiency of someone who despises wasting time. Lab expectations. Code repositories. Conference travel. Ethics protocols delivered with the weight of lived experience.
“You will not massage data,” he says, writing the words in sharp strokes on the whiteboard. “You will not ignore anomalies because they’re inconvenient. You will not ‘fix’ outliers at three in the morning because you’re tired and the deadline is tomorrow.”
His voice doesn’t change, but something under it thickens, like tar under the surface of a river. I wonder what he did at three in the morning once that carved those grooves into his rules.
Pages flip. Keys clack. I type nothing. I already know all this; I stalked every policy document on the lab website months ago. My application letter had referenced his own papers back at him, line by line, until I could’ve annotated them from memory.
What I don’t know is how he’s going to treat me now that I’ve invaded his territory for good.
“And finally,” he says, clicking to the last slide, “advisor assignments.”
The screen fills with names. Columns. Rows. The air in the room thickens as everyone leans forward in unison, breath collectively held. I scan the list for H.
My name is not on the first column. Or the second.
Third column. There: Hayes, Amelia – Rowan.
Of course.
Heat climbs the back of my neck, up into my scalp. I keep my expression neutral, but my pulse goes chaotic, uneven, like a line of bad code.
“Names in bold,” he says, “are grant-funded positions. Congratulations. Names with asterisks are on departmental support.”
My name is bold. He doesn’t say what the daggers next to certain names mean. I know anyway. The whispered warnings at the mixer, the way people had looked at me over their plastic cups.
Political appointment, someone had said near the chip table, unaware I was standing behind the half-wall. Or aware and enjoying it.
Another voice: Heard she got fast-tracked in. Rowan doesn’t take first-years. Not unless they’re…special.
The pause had done the work of ten words.
Declan looks up from the slide and lets his gaze move across the room again, slower this time. “If you’ve been assigned to me, you’ll get an email by tonight with your first meeting time. If you were hoping to be assigned to someone else…” The corner of his mouth ticks up, not quite a smile. “The registrar’s office is down the hall.”
I hate that my body reacts to that hint of humor. That the sound of his voice now is layered over the memory of him at the conference podium, dismantling my work point by brutal point.
Miss Hayes appears to have mistaken intuition for rigor.
I force the echo away. That was then. This is a different battlefield.
He dismisses us after an hour of expectations and threat-shaped jokes about 3 a.m. deploys. Chairs scrape, conversations explode, everyone suddenly loud because they’re relieved to have survived the first encounter.
I take my time closing my laptop. I am not going to be the first out the door or the last to hover near the podium like a supplicant.
“Amelia,” Tessa says, leaning over as she slides her notebook into her tote. “That’s you, right? Rowan as supervisor?”
I make my face do something approximating nonchalance. “So the slide claims.”
She snorts. “Humble flex. ‘So the slide claims,’ says the girl in bold. They gave you the big grant, didn’t they?”
I start to say no, it’s just partial funding, nothing special, really. The words snag on my tongue. I’ve been working nonstop for this since I saw the call for applications go up.
“Yes,” I say instead. It feels like stepping out onto ice. “I got the Ellison Fellowship.”
Tessa’s eyes widen. “Holy— That’s Margaret Ellison’s baby, right? The dean’s darling?” She glances over my shoulder toward the front of the room. “Well. That explains a few things.”
“Like?” My voice is too sharp. I already know like what, but I make her say it.
She hesitates, teeth catching on her lower lip. “Just…people talk, you know? New person. Big money. Rowan. It’s a story.”
“Yeah,” I say, skin pricking. “I’ve heard some of the fan fiction.”
She winces. “You know it’s crap, right?”
“I know it’s lazy,” I say. “But lazy stories travel fast.”
Something shifts in her expression—guilt, maybe, or recognition. Then it’s gone, smoothed over with a bright smile. “Anyway. If you ever want to grab coffee and complain about how terrifying he is, I am extremely available.”
“Noted.” I like her more for the way she says terrifying with equal parts awe and annoyance.
We file out with the crowd. I can feel him at the front of the room without looking—can picture exactly how he stands, one hand on the back of a chair, answering someone’s eager question with that precise, surgical patience.
I almost make it to the door.
“Ms. Hayes.”
His voice cuts through the dull roar. It shouldn’t still have the power to halt my forward momentum, but my feet stop anyway.
Every conversation within a ten-foot radius dips. Not silences, exactly—just lowers. Ears redirect.
I turn.
Up close, time collapses. Two years of late nights and meticulously crafted code compress back into the moment on that conference stage when I’d stood under the brutal glare of the projector and tried not to shake.
He’s watching me with the same steady, assessing gaze he’d used on my faulty model. But there’s something else there now, something I can’t decode. It irritates me the way an unsimplified fraction does.
“Professor Rowan,” I say, my tone level enough that I’m proud of it later. “You wanted something?”
His jaw tightens at the title. “Declan is fine in lab contexts.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I don’t commit to anything. Naming is power.
“We should schedule a meeting,” he says. “To discuss your role on the Ellison grant.” His attention flicks briefly to the students loitering around, then back. “And some…other matters.”
My fingers curl around the strap of my bag. “Such as?”
He studies me for a beat too long. I hold his gaze. If he’s looking for evidence that I’m still the girl who nearly cried in a stairwell after his keynote, he’s not going to find it.
“Office hours start at two,” he says finally. “I’d prefer to talk then. Less—” A vague sweep of his hand takes in the hovering curiosity around us. “Noise.”
I let myself glance pointedly at the cluster of second-years pretending to pack up very, very slowly. “You don’t say.”
One corner of his mouth lifts, quickly suppressed. “Two o’clock. My office.”
The last time he summoned me, it was via email, subject line: RE: Your paper. I’d opened it in the campus library and felt my cheeks burn so hot I’d had to go outside.
“Sure,” I say. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
His eyes narrow just a fraction, like he hears the unsaid: This time I come in armored.
Outside, late-summer heat slams into me. The campus is all red brick and overgrown ivy, the air saturated with the smell of cut grass and the hum of thousands of lives rearranging themselves for a new semester. Students funnel along the main quad, laughter and snippets of conversation floating like data points in a messy corpus.
Rumors are just bad models, I think. Biased training data. Lazy priors.
I can fix this.
By 1:58, I’m standing outside his office door, hand hovering an inch from the wood.
My pulse is a metronome, too loud in my ears. I inhale once, deeply. The hallway smells like toner and old carpet, the faint tang of whiteboard cleaner. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead in that particular way that makes you feel like you’re inside a lab report.
Get in, I tell myself. Stay sharp. Get out.
I knock.
“Come in,” he says, and that’s my second life-ruination event officially underway.
His office is larger than I expected, narrower than it looks from the hallway. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line one wall, the spines a riot of color and worn edges. The opposite wall is mostly whiteboard, dense with equations and syntax trees. A slim window looks out over the quad, sunlight cutting a trapezoid across the floor and catching dust motes midair.
He’s at his desk, laptop open, sleeves still rolled. He looks up as I close the door behind me. For a second, we just occupy the same space, all that history compressed into a six-by-eight room that suddenly feels too small.
“Ms. Hayes,” he says.
I arch an eyebrow. “I thought it was Declan in lab contexts.”
A pause. “You’re technically not in lab yet.”
I take the chair opposite his desk. It squeaks, protesting. “So this is…what, purgatory?”
Something like amusement flickers over his face and is gone. “Consider it onboarding.” He folds his hands on the desk, every motion precise. “First, congratulations on the Ellison Fellowship. It’s…competitive.”
“You recommended me,” I say before I can stop myself. I know because the acceptance letter had mentioned his name in the same sentence as Margaret Ellison’s.
His gaze doesn’t waver. “I did. On the strength of your application and subsequent work.”
Subsequent work. Not on the strength of that paper he’d shredded. Fine.
I feel the words before I choose them. “Funny. I thought you didn’t think I understood rigor.”
The silence after that is not academic, not neutral. It’s heavy, like the pause before an experiment blows up.
His eyes darken. “You remember that.”
“You said it in front of four hundred people. Hard to misplace.” My voice is steady, but the old humiliation licks at the edges of my memories, hot and sour.
He exhales, a slow, controlled release. “I was…harsher than I should have been.”
My heart stutters, misfires. An apology? From him?
“I treated you like a colleague,” he continues. Not quite. “In a context where most people expected me to handle you with kid gloves.”
“So your choices were ‘handle with care’ or ‘strip me for parts onstage’?” I ask. “Impressive dichotomy.”
His mouth tightens. “I was trying very hard not to be inappropriate.”
The word lands between us like a dropped mug.
Inappropriate. My brain does an unhelpful thing and flashes through every whispered insinuation I’ve heard in the last week, every smirk when people found out I’d be in his lab.
“Right,” I say, pulse roaring again for a different reason. “Wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”
His gaze sharpens. “They already have.”
There it is. The thing we’re really here to talk about.
He leans back in his chair, studies me as if deciding how much data I can handle. “I’m aware of certain rumors circulating about your placement.”
My cheeks go hot. I hate that he has the power to make me flush just by naming it. “I’m also aware,” I say, “and frankly, I don’t care what children say to make themselves feel better about a funding decision.”
“Children?” A faint, humorless huff. “Some of them are only a year younger than you.”
“Age isn’t the metric,” I snap. “Integrity is.”
His gaze stays on my face, not sliding away, not softening. “Good,” he says quietly. “Hold onto that.”
The air shifts. For a moment, we’re not adversaries but two people standing on the same side of a line neither of us drew.
Then he continues. “For what it’s worth, I have made it clear to several people that any insinuation you acquired your position through…extracurricular means is false.”
I blink. The room tilts, slightly. “You…what?”
“I don’t tolerate that kind of speculation in my lab,” he says, tone clipped now, like he’s angry on principle. “Or my department.”
I picture him in some closed-door meeting, voice that same careful blade, slicing down gossip on my behalf. I hadn’t imagined him lifting a finger, much less his reputation, for me.
It rattles something in my chest I’ve carefully bolted down.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “I didn’t.”
The dust motes in the shaft of sunlight drift like slow, suspended punctuation.
“Look,” I say, because the room suddenly feels too charged, “if this is the part where you warn me to be on my best behavior so I don’t tarnish your pristine lab metrics—”
“I don’t care about optics as much as you seem to think,” he cuts in.
That pulls my attention back to his face. His eyes are steady, strangely open. “I care about the work,” he says. “And about not watching promising people get chewed up because others are careless with the truth.”
Promising people. The words leave a faint warmth behind, like fingers brushed over skin.
“I’m not asking you to protect me,” I say, softer now. “I can do that myself.”
His jaw works once, like he’s biting back another sentence. “I’ve noticed,” he says. “You came in today looking like you were ready to go twelve rounds with me in front of the entire cohort.”
“I was,” I say. “If necessary.”
A glint in his eyes that might be respect. “Let me be very clear, Ms. Hayes. Whatever anyone says, you are here because you earned it. That’s the only defense that holds in the long run.”
Something in my chest eases, just a fractional unclenching I hadn’t realized was possible in his presence.
“And,” he adds, “because I will not supervise someone whose primary motivation is to prove me wrong at every turn.”
The ease evaporates. “I don’t—”
“You do,” he says, not unkindly. “You’ve spent two years defining yourself in opposition to me. That’s…unsustainable, if we’re going to share a project.”
Heat climbs my throat again, but it’s not just anger now; it’s the mortifying sting of accuracy. “What I define myself as,” I say, each word chosen with care, “is a scientist who will not be humiliated by you—or anyone—ever again.”
His gaze doesn’t flinch. “Good. Then let’s make sure your work is unassailable enough that no one can.”
For a heartbeat, the world narrows to the space between us. The whiteboard behind him. The hum of the vents. The soft click of someone’s footsteps passing in the hallway.
I realize with a sudden, destabilizing clarity that this is the new problem set: not just surviving him, but working with him. Day after day. Line after line of code, shoulder to shoulder.
And he’s not the unfeeling ice sculpture I’d curated in my head. He’s more dangerous than that.
He extends a folder across the desk. I take it; our fingers don’t touch, but the nearness feels like a test I’m not prepared for.
“Read this,” he says. “It’s the current grant proposal draft and some background literature. We’ll start you on preprocessing next week.”
I flip the folder open just enough to see dense paragraphs, figures, margin notes in his tight handwriting. My name appears on the second page under ‘Key Personnel.’ Seeing it there, printed, entwined with his, sends a strange jolt through me.
“I’ll have comments by tomorrow,” I say.
He studies me for a beat. “Take the weekend.”
“Tomorrow is fine.”
That almost-smile tugs at his mouth again. “I see Margaret wasn’t exaggerating.”
“About what?”
“Your…work ethic.”
That’s not the phrase he almost used, but I let it go.
I stand, the chair squeaking again. The air between us feels different now—no softer, exactly, but charged in a new direction. Like the initial conditions of an equation have just shifted by a nontrivial epsilon.
“One more thing,” he says as I reach for the door.
I look back.
“For the duration of this project,” he says carefully, “I suggest you avoid being alone in closed spaces with any member of this department who is not me.”
The words land heavy, unexpected. “Excuse me?”
His expression is unreadable, but his hands are too still. “If you want to minimize fuel for rumors, control the variables you can. You can’t stop people from talking, but you can stop handing them lazy narratives.”
“And being seen in your office with the door closed doesn’t fuel anything?” I ask.
He holds my gaze. “They’re already telling that story. We may as well ensure the only thing they can point to is your work.”
A chill moves down my spine, equal parts warning and something else.
“So that’s it?” I ask. “Your grand supervisory advice? Don’t be alone with anyone but you?”
His lips press together. “For now,” he says. “That’s the most immediately useful thing I can give you.”
The most immediately useful thing. Not the most comfortable.
I open the door, the noise from the hallway rushing back in. Before I step out, I look at him one last time.
“If you think I’m going to let you be the only person allowed to ruin my life, Professor,” I say quietly, “you’re overestimating your importance.”
His eyes flicker, something like challenge sparking there. “We’ll see, Ms. Hayes.”
I step into the corridor, folder in hand, heart knocking out an erratic new rhythm.
Behind me, the door clicks shut.
Somewhere down the hall, a voice I don’t quite recognize says my name, low and speculative.
“Amelia Hayes,” it murmurs. “So that’s her.”
I don’t turn around.
Yet.
