Chapter Three

Los Angeles, California — Present Day

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The rejection came in at 11:58 a.m., four minutes before her lecture, and Leah decided somewhere on the walk from her office to the classroom that she would treat the timing as either a mercy or an omen, depending on how the next fifty minutes went.

Dear Dr. Sarkisian, Thank you for your interest in the Whitcombe Fellowship. This year's committee received an exceptionally strong pool of applicants...

She had read enough of these to know the paragraph broke down into three moving parts, like a hymn with a chorus everyone in the room already knew: gratitude, competition, regret. She did not need to read past the second sentence to know how the third one ended, and she didn't. She turned the phone face-down on the podium the way you'd put down a hand you already knew had lost, and looked out at forty-one students who had enrolled in Introduction to Comparative Religion because it satisfied a general-education requirement and met at eleven, and who were, this particular Tuesday, mostly looking at their own phones instead of hers.

"Genesis, chapter three," she said, and half of them looked up, which by the standards of an eleven o'clock gen-ed section was practically an ovation. "Verse twenty-one. Somebody read it."

A young man in the second row, the kind of student who did the reading because he'd been raised to and not because he cared, found it on his phone and read it in the flat, unpunctuated voice of someone allergic to interpretation. "And the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them."

"Thank you." Leah wrote it on the board anyway, because some things were worth the extra half-second it took a room to see a sentence rather than just hear it. "That's the whole verse. One sentence. No material specified, no construction, no explanation of where God got the skin from in a world that's four days old and doesn't have death in it yet. Nobody in this room is going to lose sleep over that detail, and for about three thousand years, almost nobody did. But a very specific handful of people, across three religious traditions, could not let it go — and if you want to know what a text does to the people who refuse to leave it alone, this is a genuinely excellent one to study, because the not-leaving-it-alone is the whole story."

This was, more or less, the sentence her dissertation committee had made her cut from her introduction, on the grounds that it sounded less like a thesis statement and more like a confession.

She got through the lecture the way she got through most of them now — competently, a little too fast in the second half, because she could feel the room's attention degrading in real time and had learned to outrun it rather than fight it — and she did not, this time, let herself go down the corridor of the lecture she actually wanted to give, the one about the 'or/'or wordplay, the light-versus-skin argument that had eaten four years of her life and produced a dissertation a tenure committee at a real research university had once described, in a rejection letter she still had memorized, as "more antiquarian than analytical." She had gone looking, in that dissertation, for the places the legend crossed borders it wasn't supposed to be able to cross — a Jewish midrash showing up, barely disguised, inside a Syriac Christian text, showing up again three centuries later filtered through a Judeo-Persian community nobody outside a narrow slice of manuscript studies had ever heard of. She had built her best chapter around a single family's private manuscript fragment, cited twice in her footnotes, sourced from a photostat a Beirut archive had let her copy once, in 2014, and never let her see again — from a family whose actual name she had never once been able to attach to a living address anywhere on earth. Her advisor had called that fragment "charming but unverifiable," in the margin of her draft, in the specific tone people used for work they had already decided not to take seriously.

She had never stopped thinking about that family. She would not have admitted, to anyone, how often.

Her phone buzzed twice on the walk back to her office — not the fellowship committee again, but her mother, a voice memo this time instead of a text, which meant something had happened at her aunt's in Isfahan worth telling in a language rather than typing it. Leah listened to eleven seconds of her mother's voice, warm and quick and entirely in Armenian, something about her cousin's daughter's engagement, something about her aunt's hip, and typed back in English, that's wonderful, tell Auntie I love her, call you this weekend — because it was faster, because she was tired, because — and this was the part she never said out loud, not even to herself in a mirror — because answering in Armenian always felt, lately, like handing over something she hadn't finished deciding whether she was still allowed to keep.

She was thinking about that, and not about the fellowship, and not yet about the fragment, when she came around the corner into the humanities building's third-floor corridor and saw a man standing outside her office door who was very obviously not waiting on office hours.

He was older — sixties, maybe closer to seventy, though he stood the way a much younger man stands when he wants to be underestimated. Gray suit, no tie, nothing that would have looked out of place at a conference, except that nobody at a conference stood that still in a hallway, hands loosely clasped in front of him, watching the door rather than his phone, the way people watched things when they had already decided the waiting itself was information. He had no laptop bag. He didn't have the hunted, apologetic posture of a student here to argue about a grade. He had, instead, the stillness of a man who had waited outside a great many doors in his life and had stopped, decades ago, finding it difficult.

"Dr. Sarkisian." Not a question. He said her name the way you'd confirm an address you already knew was correct.

"That's me." She kept her keys in her hand, which was not quite a defensive gesture and was not quite not one, either. "Office hours aren't until three."

"I'm not a student." He said it without apology, which she noticed, because most people who weren't students led with an apology for taking up her time. "My name is Ronen. I'd like ten minutes, if you have them, about your dissertation."

"My dissertation is nine years old and four people have read it."

"Five," he said. "As of this morning." And then, before she could decide whether that was meant to be charming or unsettling — it landed, somehow, as both — he said the rest of it, quietly, in the flat, unhurried register of a man delivering a sentence he had rehearsed more than once on the drive over. "I'd like to ask you about a family you cited twice and could never find. I think I might know what happened to them."

Leah stood in the hallway with her keys in her hand and felt the particular vertigo of a door she had spent nine years being told didn't exist swinging open in front of her, on a Tuesday, in a beige corridor that smelled like burnt coffee and floor wax, and said nothing at all for long enough that the man — Ronen, whoever Ronen was — allowed himself, just barely, something that was not quite a smile.

"I'll take that as ten minutes," he said.