Chapter 1: The Red Pen

I never meant for him to see it.

The document was supposed to be private — a late-night fantasy I typed out at 2 a.m. after his lecture on erotic subtext in Victorian literature. I had titled the file “Notes for Thesis,” buried it in a folder inside another folder, and told myself no one would ever find it. But Professor Elias Hawthorne had asked the entire grad seminar to submit our rough thesis outlines through the university portal, and in my sleep-deprived haze I had uploaded the wrong file.

Now I sat in his office, knees pressed tightly together under my plaid skirt, heart...