The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 13: Pressure
Marieke did not smile.
The envelope stayed in my hand because I had not yet learned where to put it. On her desk there were three articles, a mug with a brown ring at the bottom, two pens, and a small stack of lab notes written in her narrow hand. The room had made space for many kinds of disorder. It had no place prepared for a lottery ticket worth enough to change the shape of my life.
“How much?” she asked again.
“I don’t know the exact payout yet.”
“That was not what I asked.”
“No.”
She stood near the desk in the sweater she wore when she had stopped pretending she was leaving the lab at a reasonable hour. Her hair was pinned up badly, with one piece loose near her cheek. It made her look younger, then not young at all when her eyes returned to the envelope.
“Enough for the building,” I said. “Enough to make the bank listen differently. Enough to make every foolish part of me speak louder.”
Marieke took that in without moving. “Who knows?”
“You.”
“No one else?”
“The woman at the kiosk knows I bought a newspaper and went pale. That is all.”
“Have you claimed it?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where is the ticket?”
I lifted the envelope slightly.
“Do not wave it at me,” she said.
I lowered it. For a moment, something ordinary almost entered the room. Her irritation. My obedience to it. The cold coffee. The rain tapping faintly against the window. Then her gaze sharpened.
“How did you know the numbers?”
The impossible part stood patient and ugly behind everything else.
“I remembered them,” I said.
Marieke’s face did not change much. I had learned that the small changes were the dangerous ones. Her mouth closed with slightly too much care.
“From where?”
I looked at the envelope.
“James.”
“From before.”
She gave a short breath that might have become a laugh if there had been humour in the room. “Before what?”
I had answers available. Childhood. A newspaper. Someone mentioning the draw. A coincidence dressed in memory. None of them could survive her looking at me for more than a second.
“I cannot give you that cleanly,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I noticed.”
She turned away from me and picked up the mug from the desk, then put it down again without drinking. The movement was so pointless and human that it hurt more than composure would have. Marieke disliked useless gestures. That one had escaped before she could stop it.
“I hate this,” she said.
“The money?”
“That you make sense until you suddenly don’t.” She looked back at me. “You come here with the dangerous part and then stop where everything goes dark.”
“I came here before I touched the money.”
“Yes.”
“I came because I thought if I waited, I would start arranging it.”
“Yes,” she said again, and the second yes sounded more tired than the first. “I am trying not to ignore that because I am angry.”
I nodded once. I did not trust myself with more.
“How angry?” I asked.
She looked at me then, properly. “Do not make me measure it for your comfort.”
Fair.
I put the envelope on the desk, beside the cold mug but not too near the edge. Marieke watched where I placed it. Then she looked at my hand, as if the hand itself had betrayed both of us by bringing the thing here.
“I do not know what this makes you,” she said.
“No.”
“I do not mean morally.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“No,” I said after a moment. “Probably not.”
That answer unsettled her. She rubbed at one eye with the heel of her hand, an impatient gesture, then let her hand fall.
“What happens tomorrow?”
“I claim it properly. No fragments. No drama. Keep the documentation. Speak to Mrs. Claes again when there is paper instead of possibility.”
“That sounds sensible.”
“I have had practice sounding sensible.”
Her gaze lifted. I regretted the sentence immediately, not because it was wrong, but because it had shown too much tooth. Marieke folded her arms, then unfolded them. Another useless gesture.
“Do not come here only after you have already decided,” she said.
“I had not decided everything.”
“No. You had decided the shape. You wanted me to know before the shape hardened.”
“Yes.”
“That is better than nothing.”
“I know.”
“It is not enough.”
“I know that too.”
She looked at the envelope again. “Take it out of my reach before I become responsible for it in my head.”
I picked it up at once.
Marieke almost smiled then. Almost. “Very obedient with illegal amounts of luck.”
“It is not illegal.”
“That is not my main concern.”
“No.”
The money had not left with my hand. It sat on the desk, in the wall, in the space between her questions and the ones I could not yet answer.
At the door, she stopped me with my name. I turned.
“Claim it,” she said. “Study. Sleep if you can. And if you decide something that changes me, do not inform me afterward like a bank clerk.”
“I won’t.”
“You might.”
The truth of that stayed between us.
“Yes,” I said. “I might.”
Her face softened, but only enough to show the effort it cost to keep it from hardening. “Then try not to.”
The miracle became paperwork before noon.
A counter. My identity card. A number called from a machine that clicked too loudly. A woman behind glass who had seen enough winners to distrust excitement. My signature copied twice because the first one drifted at the end. A receipt. Instructions. Waiting. The ticket left my hand and became a file. I walked back into the cold with paper in my coat pocket and the strange feeling that the future now had my name and address. Leuven did not care.
The city was half-empty after New Year, emptied of the students who could still pretend exams were a problem for later and full of the ones who had returned early because fear is punctual. The library lights burned all day. Cafés near the university served coffee to faces that had stopped believing in sleep. In the anatomy hall, someone had written a list of cranial nerves on the back of a flyer and taped it above the sink. By evening it had three corrections in different handwriting.
I tried to study in my room and discovered that money could be louder than construction work.
The brachial plexus lay open in front of me. Roots, trunks, divisions, cords, branches. I knew the body in ways no first-year should.
I had seen bodies open under worse lights than the ones in the dissection hall. I had pressed hands against wounds, recognized shock before monitors named it, watched young men discover too late that anatomy did not care about courage. None of that gave me permission to be sloppy on an exam. A professor did not want memory from field hospitals. He wanted the correct branch, the correct origin, the correct phrasing, written clearly enough for a tired examiner to trust.
The page blurred. I opened the notebook because that was what I did when the world grew too large.
Study. Road. Strength. Food. Sleep. Money. Want.
Money had too much in it now. Sleep had nothing honest beside it.
Under Want, I wrote Marieke’s name and crossed it out before the ink had dried. Then I wrote nothing after it, which was worse. The phone moved against the desk.
Happy New Year, doctor-in-progress.
Lizzy.
I looked at the message longer than the words required.
Still just in-progress.
Fine. Happy New Year, in-progress.
Good luck with exams.
Thank you.
Her next message took a little longer.
And with the rest.
The rest sat on the screen like a small hand on a closed door. Home. The station. Her coat collar turned up against the cold. The way she had said she did not know which version of me she missed sometimes. I set the phone down, then picked it up again because leaving her there felt too much like an old skill.
The rest is not behaving.
Her reply came after a minute.
Poor rest. Probably wants attention.
I smiled despite myself.
You are enjoying this.
A little.
Good luck, James.
I wanted, briefly and stupidly, to keep writing until the rest behaved or pretended to. Instead I placed the phone face down and returned to the brachial plexus. The page had not improved in my absence.
By eight, the study group had colonized its old table on the second floor of the library. Elise had arrived with the exam dates written twice: once in her planner and once on a loose sheet she slid in front of Mathis because, as she said, his relationship with calendars had become adversarial.
“It is not adversarial,” Mathis said.
“You thought physiology was on Wednesday.”
“It is on Wednesday.”
“Next Wednesday.”
He stared at the sheet. “That is hostile design.”
“It is a date,” Elise said.
Saar sat at the end of the table with a law book open and no visible intention of reading it. She had come, she said, because the law library was full of people whispering as if conspiracy made memorization easier. In truth, she watched us the way she watched most rooms: not suspicious of everyone, only unwilling to let nonsense pass uninspected.
I took my seat, opened my notes, and began answering questions.
At first it worked. That was the danger. Competence forgives itself quickly when others are relieved by it. Mathis asked about cardiac output. I gave him the formula, then the mechanism, then a quick clinical example that made his eyes clear for half a second.
Elise asked about renal regulation and interrupted me twice to refine terminology. I let her because she was right. Two students from the tutoring group had joined us with permission no one remembered granting. They had blank notebooks and the pale gratitude of people who had found a warm room during a storm.
I explained. I corrected. I drew diagrams. I made three difficult things easier and watched everyone relax around the mistake. Saar watched for nearly an hour before speaking.
“You are not teaching,” she said.
Mathis looked up as if a gun had been placed on the table.
“I am fairly sure I am,” I said.
“No. You’re clearing obstacles.”
Elise stopped writing. One of the younger students looked between us, hoping the adult conversation would not become relevant to her.
“Obstacles are the point of the evening,” I said.
“They are the point of the exam too.” Saar tapped the table once with her pen. “If you remove all of them before they learn where their feet go, you are not helping. You are carrying them.”
The two students who had joined without permission stopped writing at the same moment and then started again, badly, the way people do when they have decided the argument is not theirs. Elise turned a page that did not need turning. Below us on the stairs a trolley of returns went past, and nobody at the table looked up.
Mathis looked down at his notes. The comment should have landed gently because it was not aimed only at me but I felt it sharply.
“They need to pass,” I said.
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