Chapter 3

The cold satisfaction from his encounter with Emma was a fleeting, hollow thing. It was the ghost of a flavor, the memory of a meal that had failed to nourish. Driving away from the skeletal Ashton Tower, the city lights below blurred into meaningless, smeared streaks of neon. He had broken her, yes. He had taken a sledgehammer to the beautiful, fragile terrarium of her life, shattered the glass, and paid himself back in the precious currency of her humiliation and complete submission. But as the potent, violent adrenaline faded, the familiar, gaping emptiness returned. It was a black hole in the center of his chest, a voracious void that no single act of vengeance, no matter how profound, could fill.

He drove for hours, aimlessly, the engine a low hum that did little to drown out the ringing silence in his own head. The victory over Emma felt ... physical. He had conquered her body, but the core of his rage wasn’t just physical. It was a more complex beast. Emma’s betrayal had been one of shame, a social rejection. It was cutting, humiliating, but ultimately, it was superficial. It was about appearances, about her kicking away the ladder of her past. It was an insult to his history.

Suzie’s betrayal was different. It was deeper, more insidious. It wasn’t a slash to the skin; it was a cancer in the bone. She hadn’t just been ashamed of his blue-collar life; she had judged his very essence, his mind. She had put his soul on a scale and found it wanting.

The memory, sharp and vivid as if it had happened an hour ago, played out in his mind’s eye. The disastrous family dinner three years ago, an attempt at reconciliation he had foolishly initiated. They were at a stuffy, overpriced restaurant of Suzie’s choosing.

“What would we even talk about, Chris?” she had asked, her voice laced with a kind of weary, academic pity. She’d gestured vaguely with her wine glass. “The two of us. Really. The relative price of lumber? The tensile strength of drywall?”

Her husband, Mark, the celebrated Professor Albright, had chuckled. It was a dry, superior little sound, a puff of intellectual smoke. He hadn’t said a word, but his smirk, the condescending gleam in his eyes over the rim of his own glass, had co-signed her dismissal. It was a two-pronged attack that had filleted him, leaving him exposed and bleeding on the white tablecloth.

She had called him simple. An intellectual barren.

She, who he had spent countless nights with at their battered kitchen table after their mother died, his own homework forgotten. He remembered the smell of burnt coffee and her frustrated sighs as he patiently, methodically, explained algebra problems until she finally saw the logic. He remembered proofreading her essays on Shakespeare, his rough, calloused fingers, smudged with grease or dirt from his after-school job, tracing the lines of text she would later use to build her ivory tower. He had bought her the books with overtime pay, celebrated her degrees with a fierce, bursting pride that she had later thrown back in his face like cheap, unwanted charity.

His revenge on Lisa had been an act of pure, volcanic rage. A punishment. His war with Emma had been a strategic demolition. A claiming.

With Suzie, it had to be an intellectual assassination.

He couldn’t beat her with his fists. He couldn’t simply fuck the arrogance out of her; her pride wasn’t seated in her body, but in her mind. He had to beat her at her own game. He had to find the god she worshipped—her brilliant husband—and prove he was a false idol. He had to dismantle her entire belief system, and in doing so, prove that his mind, the simple, practical mind she’d so casually dismissed, was a far more dangerous and intricate weapon than she could ever have imagined.

This would not be a war of passion. This would be a cold war, fought in the hushed, sanctimonious halls of academia and won with the quiet, devastating power of a well-placed, surgically precise truth.

The following Monday, Chris walked onto the campus of Northwood University. The transition was jarring, like stepping through a portal into another dimension. He’d just come from a morning meeting on a muddy, chaotic job site where the air hummed with the roar of heavy machinery and the shouts of men. Here, the only sounds were the rustle of autumn leaves, the distant chime of a bell tower, and the murmur of hushed conversations. Old brick buildings, dignified and stoic, were draped in ivy like dowager queens in green shawls. Students, young and bursting with the unearned confidence of the privileged, drifted across manicured lawns like schools of bright, chattering fish.

He felt like an alien. His muscular frame, the breadth of his shoulders under a simple grey henley, his work-worn hands with their thickened knuckles and a network of faint white scars—he was a creature of a different species. He could feel their casual, dismissive glances as he walked the stone pathways, looking for the main library. It was the same look Suzie had perfected: a quick, appraising scan that took in his physical presence and immediately categorized him as other. Unintellectual. Unimportant. It didn’t anger him. It fueled the cold, clean-burning fire in his gut.

He found the library, a massive, neo-gothic cathedral of knowledge. Pushing open the heavy oak doors, he stepped inside, and the change in atmosphere was immediate. The air was cool and still, smelling of old paper, binding glue, dust, and floor wax. It was a temple of silence, so profound it felt like a physical pressure against his eardrums. The only sounds were the reverent whisper of turning pages, the soft, rhythmic tapping of keyboards, and the occasional, apologetic cough. He felt a surge of defiant power, a grim satisfaction. He, Chris the construction worker, the man of dirt and sweat and noise, was invading their most sacred space.

He found a bank of public computer terminals in a brightly lit, sterile section of the ground floor. He sat down, the chair feeling too small, his large frame feeling clumsy and out of place. He watched a young woman next to him, her fingers flying across the keyboard, her screen filled with complex equations. He felt a flicker of the old insecurity, the feeling Suzie had always managed to inspire in him. He crushed it. He was not here to feel. He was here to hunt.

He began his research. Professor Mark Albright. PhD, Yale. Chair of the Post-Modern Literature department. The university website was a monument to the man’s ego. A professionally shot photo showed him leaning against a bookshelf, a pipe in his hand, his expression one of thoughtful, benign genius. It was all bullshit. He had a string of published articles in esoteric journals with titles like “The Liminal Space of the Subaltern Narrator” and “Semiotic Decay in Late-Stage Capitalism.” The words were meaningless to him, a self-congratulatory word salad designed to exclude.

He focused on the books. The first, a dense analysis of the philosopher Derrida, was too obscure. But the second, the one that had made him a minor celebrity in his field and earned him his tenure, was titled The Fractured Narrative: Identity and Anachronism in Post-War Fiction. It had been hailed by critics as a “seminal work,” “a paradigm shift in literary theory.” It was the foundation of Mark’s career. It was the target.

Chris spent two solid hours just reading summaries, reviews, and critiques of the book. It was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Deconstruction, post-structuralism, intertextuality. The language was a fortress, designed to keep people like him out. But Chris wasn’t trying to storm the fortress. He was looking for a secret passage. He was a builder; he knew that every structure, no matter how complex, starts with a blueprint. Every idea comes from somewhere. And Mark Albright, a man who coasted on an air of effortless, pipe-smoking brilliance, was a man who took shortcuts. Chris knew it in his bones. The laziest foremen were always the ones who boasted the most.

He went to the circulation desk. The librarian, a stern-looking woman with severe glasses, looked down her nose at him.

“Can I help you?” Her tone suggested it was unlikely.

“I need a book,” Chris said, his voice steady. “The Fractured Narrative, by Mark Albright.”

She tapped at her keyboard. “That’s in the faculty archives. It’s non-circulating. You can read it in the designated reading room.”

She directed him to a silent, intimidating room where a few lonely-looking grad students were hunched over ancient texts. Holding the heavy, pretentious tome in his hands, he felt a strange sense of purpose. This was the weapon. He just had to figure out how to load it.

He found a secluded carrel in the dusty upper stacks, a small, solitary cubicle that felt like a cell. The silence was absolute. He began to read. He didn’t read for comprehension of the baroque arguments. He read for patterns. He read the footnotes. He read the bibliography. He was a forensic accountant searching for a single, misaligned number. He was a demolitions expert tapping along a wall, listening for the hollow spot. He was looking for a crack, a loose thread he could pull that would unravel the entire, elaborate tapestry of Mark’s genius.

He spent three days in that library. He would show up at his job site at dawn, put in six hard hours, then come here, to this silent, alien world, and work until the library closed. His body ached from the unaccustomed stillness, his eyes burned from staring at the tiny print. He was surrounded by ghosts and whispers, poring over Mark’s book and then cross-referencing every source, every mention. He learned how to navigate the university’s complex online databases, moving from one cited author to the next. It was a dizzying, frustrating descent into a rabbit hole of academic incest, where everyone was quoting everyone else in a closed, self-referential loop.

On the fourth day, hunched over the book under the weak, yellow glow of the carrel light, his back screaming in protest, he found it.

It wasn’t a smoking gun. It was a whisper. It was a trapdoor, cunningly disguised as a piece of solid flooring.

In the extensive bibliography of The Fractured Narrative, Mark cited a paper by a little-known French academic named Jean-Luc Verrone. A quick search showed Verrone had published very little and had died in the mid-nineties. He was a ghost. In a footnote on page 247, attached to a dense paragraph about narrative unreliability, Mark casually dismissed Verrone’s central thesis as “promising but ultimately underdeveloped.”

It was a brilliant piece of academic camouflage. A predator hiding its tracks by kicking a bit of dirt over them. Chris felt a jolt, a hunter’s instinct. Why cite, only to dismiss, a completely obscure academic? Unless the citation itself was the camouflage.

He dug deeper, using the university’s access to international databases. He tracked down Verrone’s original paper. It had been published in a small, defunct Parisian intellectual journal in 1988. The title was Le Récit Brisé: Anachronisme et la Schizophrénie de l’Identité. The Broken Narrative: Anachronism and the Schizophrenia of Identity.

His heart began a slow, heavy, triumphant drumbeat against his ribs.

It took him another day and a bit of luck to find someone to translate the dense, academic French. The translator was a grad student in the French department, a young woman named Chloe whose disastrous plumbing he had fixed for free a few months back. He’d found her number on a community bulletin board, and she’d been near tears over a flood in her off-campus apartment. He’d spent a Saturday fixing it, refusing to take any money. He’d left her his number, just in case. Now, he was calling in the favor. She was happy to help, intrigued by the obscure text.

When she emailed him the translated PDF the next evening, he read it in his truck in the library parking lot, the screen of his phone glowing in the dark.

It was all there.

It was the whole goddamn thing. The entire core concept of Mark’s “seminal” work. The idea of using anachronism not as a simple mistake or authorial flourish, but as a deliberate narrative tool to fracture a character’s identity from within. Verrone had laid out the entire theoretical framework, using many of the same core examples from French literature that Mark later used as a jumping-off point. Mark hadn’t just borrowed an idea; he had strip-mined Verrone’s entire intellectual landscape, stolen the blueprint, the materials, and the architectural plans, then built a slightly different-looking house on top of it, dressing it up in more fashionable, American-friendly jargon. The footnote wasn’t a citation; it was a smokescreen, an act of breathtaking arrogance, a clever misdirection to throw any curious scholar off the scent. Who would bother to track down an obscure, out-of-print paper only to read a dismissive footnote about it?

But it wasn’t enough. It was one academic’s word against another’s. It was a dead, forgotten Frenchman versus a celebrated, tenured, living American professor. It would be a messy “he said, he said.” A controversy, perhaps, but one Mark could likely weather with a few well-placed denials and accusations of mistranslation.

Chris needed something more personal, more undeniable. He needed a body. He needed a victim with a local address.

Chris shifted his focus. The foundation of the crime was laid. Now he needed to find the human cost. He turned his research from Mark’s sources to Mark’s students. He spent another week in the library, but this time he was digging through different archives: university records, departmental newsletters, old, archived online student forums from the university’s server. He was looking for a ghost. A brilliant student who had worked closely with Mark, who had maybe proposed a similar thesis, and who had then ... disappeared. Dropped out. Failed. Vanished from academia like a puff of smoke.

He found him in the graduating class of 2009. A name that appeared again and again on honor rolls and award lists, then vanished abruptly. David Chen.

David had been a star PhD candidate. His name was everywhere for a period of three years, praised for his insightful essays and brilliant seminar contributions. Then, nothing. Chris found what he was looking for in a dusty, scanned PDF of a departmental newsletter from the spring of 2009. It listed the current PhD candidates and their proposed dissertation topics. David Chen’s was listed as: Temporal Dissonance and the Unreliable Self in the Works of Pynchon and Vonnegut.

It was dangerously, damningly close to the theme of Mark’s book, which had been published in the fall of 2011, two years after David Chen abruptly left the program. The official record cited “personal reasons.” He was just one semester shy of finishing his degree.

Chris dug deeper. This part of the research he did from his own laptop at home, using public record databases and people-finder skills he’d picked up doing background checks for side jobs for a buddy’s private investigation firm. He wasn’t just a construction worker anymore; he was an investigator, a hunter. And he was patient.

He found the modern-day David Chen. He wasn’t a professor at another university. He wasn’t a published writer. He was the assistant manager at a struggling comic book shop called “Dimension X” on the other side of town, a place wedged between a vape shop and a laundromat.

The shop smelled of old paper, plastic sleeves, and youthful nostalgia that had curdled into adult disappointment. The air was thick with the scent of unfulfilled dreams. David Chen was in his late thirties, but he looked fifty. He was thin and pale, with tired, incredibly intelligent eyes behind smudged glasses. He had the slumped posture of a man who had been thoroughly, comprehensively defeated by life. He was bagging a customer’s purchase of a stack of back issues with a kind of weary, robotic resignation.

Chris waited until the customer, a teenager with greasy hair, left. He approached the counter, feigning interest in a rack of expensive graphic novels, the smell of fresh ink a stark contrast to the mustiness of the rest of the shop.

“David Chen?” Chris asked, his voice calm and even.

David looked up, a flicker of surprise in his tired eyes. People didn’t come in here asking for him by name. “Yeah? Can I help you find something?”

“My name is Chris. I’m an old friend of Suzie Albright’s,” he lied smoothly, the name a key to a lock he needed to pick. “I was a big admirer of her husband’s work. The Fractured Narrative. Brilliant stuff.”

At the mention of Albright’s name, a shadow passed over David’s face. It was a subtle thing, a tightening of his jaw, a darkening in his eyes, a sudden stillness in his hands. It was the reaction of a man hearing the name of his torturer. It was the reaction Chris had been hoping for. A wound, still tender and raw after a decade.

“I was doing some research for a project,” Chris continued, leaning casually against the counter, adopting a confidential, conspiratorial tone. “And I came across your name. Your proposed dissertation from back in ‘09. It struck me as ... prescient. Ahead of its time.”

David went pale. His hands, which had been still, started moving again, wiping down the already clean glass counter with a tattered rag. The movements were jerky, agitated. “That was a long time ago. I didn’t finish.”

“I know,” Chris said softly, his voice laced with a sympathy he didn’t feel but could perform perfectly. “That’s what I find so interesting. You have this brilliant, original idea. You’re on the verge of getting your doctorate. Your work is praised by everyone. And then you just ... stop. You walk away from it all. And two years later, your advisor, Mark Albright, publishes a bestselling, career-making book based on a remarkably similar premise. It’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?”

David stopped wiping. He dropped the rag as if it had burned him. He looked at Chris, really looked at him for the first time, and his eyes were filled with a pain so old and so deep it was shocking. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“Justice,” Chris said, the word tasting strange and true on his tongue. It wasn’t just for David. It was for himself. “I think Professor Albright is a fraud. A thief. And I think he stole his career directly from you.”

David let out a bitter, humorless laugh that ended in a rattling cough. He looked away, at the rows of colorful comic books, heroes frozen in poses of power he could no longer imagine for himself. “And what are you going to do about it? Huh? You think anyone will believe me? A failed student, a comic book store clerk, against the celebrated, tenured Chair of the department? He buried me. He told the dissertation board my research was derivative, that my central thesis was untenable. He called my work a ‘mess of half-formed, juvenile ideas.’ He used my own insecurities against me, twisted my own theories until I didn’t know what was real anymore. He destroyed my confidence. He destroyed my career. He took my whole fucking future.” The words came out in a torrent, a decade of poison finally being lanced.

Chris nodded slowly. He saw a perfect, heartbreaking mirror of his own deep-seated resentment in this man’s eyes. “I believe you,” he said. And he did. “And I can help you. I have resources. But I need your proof. Your original proposal. Your notes. Your drafts. Anything that proves the ideas were yours first. Anything with a date on it.”

David stared at him, suspicion warring with a desperate, flickering hope in his exhausted face. “Why? Why do you care? Who are you, really? No friend of Suzie’s would be doing this.”

Chris leaned in closer, his voice dropping to an intimate, persuasive murmur. “Let’s just say I have my own personal reasons for wanting to see Mark Albright taken down a peg. Let’s say I don’t like intellectual bullies. Let’s say I have a debt to collect from the Albright family. You give me the ammunition, and I promise you, I will fire the shot. I will burn his ivory tower to the ground.” He pulled a thick, plain white envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and placed it on the counter. “And this is for your time. And for your trouble.”