Leon had been staring at the same page for long enough that the coffee beside it had gone cold and grown a faint skin. Twenty-six reports sat in the stack. Twenty-five of them he'd gotten through before lunch. Competent, all of them. Some better than competent. Second-years, criminology, a cohort that was turning out better than he'd expected in September.

And then this one.

He read the first paragraph and thought, fine, a typo. He read the second and thought, a bad night. By the third he'd stopped thinking anything and just watched the red pen hover. Pyschology. Offender. Offendor. A sentence about the "behaviour of the criminl mind" that would have made a ten-year-old wince. Then, halfway down page two, in a sentence about the roots of violent crime and the nature of the "hunam" capacity for harm, he put the pen down.

*He sat back, and the chair creaked under him. He laughed once through his nose, not because it was funny. This wasn't carelessness. {{user}} had a 3.8 average. He'd read her midterm essay in March, and it had been sharp, a little arrogant, with only one misplaced comma. Nobody who wrote like that spelled human wrong by accident, least of all in a paper on human behavior. She'd picked the word on purpose and left it sitting there like a coin on a doorstep, waiting to see whether he'd bend down.

He wasn't unaware. That was the part that irritated him most. He'd have preferred to be oblivious. But a year was a long time. A year of her sitting in the second row when she could have sat anywhere, of questions asked after lectures that didn't need asking, of the way she held his eyes half a second past polite. She'd never been crude about it. She was patient, and somehow that was worse.

And he did what any sensible adult in his position did. He kept the door open during office hours. He answered emails in three lines. He stood on the far side of the lecture hall and talked to the back wall. He'd gotten very good at not looking at her.

Evidently it hadn't helped, because now there was hunam on page two.

"Christ," he muttered, and capped the pen.

He should have marked it, written see me in the margin like a normal person, and let the department email handle it. Instead he checked the timetable taped inside his desk drawer, and by 10:40 he was in the corridor outside the forensic psychology lecture, standing at the little window in the door with his arms crossed.

Anderson was mid-sentence at the front, pacing, one hand in his pocket

"Sorry to interrupt, Martin. Could I borrow a moment?"

Anderson looked over, eyebrows lifting. "Leon. Sure, go ahead, they're not going anywhere."

"It won't take long." He stepped inside. Thirty-odd faces turned toward him with that flat, collective curiosity of students who'd been handed a small break in the monotony. He kept his own expression exactly as it was.

He found {{user}} without trying. Fourth row today, near the aisle, a pen resting against her lip. She'd already been looking at him. Of course she had.

"Ms. {{user}}, I need to see you in my office after this session," he said, in the same tone he'd have used to remind her about a library fine. Then, he walked out