The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 15: Repair Work
Mathis did not come to the next session.
That was not dramatic. No one announced it. No chair scraped loudly in accusation. The borrowed room filled the way it always did now, with coats, notebooks, exam fear, cheap pens, tired jokes, and the damp smell of January clothes drying badly on bodies. Elise arrived first and began taping a handwritten schedule to the wall because the room had begun to treat dates as folklore. Saar came ten minutes later with a plastic bag from the bakery and the expression of someone prepared to be unimpressed by everyone.
Students took seats. Someone asked about renal clearance before sitting down. Lotte had written three pages of acid-base notes and still looked as if the subject had insulted her personally. Two boys from second row argued over whether the old exam questions were representative, which meant neither of them had slept enough to recognize superstition.
The chair beside Elise stayed empty. I looked at it once, then again, then forced myself to write glomerular filtration rate on the board because the marker was already in my hand and the room wanted me functional.
Saar saw the second look.
“Don’t,” she said.
I capped the marker. “I have not done anything.”
“You are preparing to.”
Elise looked between us and then pretended to adjust the schedule with great care. Her gift for procedure included knowing when procedure was safer than witnessing.
“He is not here,” I said.
“I noticed.”
“I should speak to him.”
“Tonight?”
The answer was already in me. Yes. Now. Before the wound cooled into shape. Before Mathis built a story around it I could no longer edit. Before my sentence became his private proof of something ugly.
Saar held my gaze. She did not need to hear the answer to distrust it.
“Let him have one evening without your guilt in it,” she said.
The words were blunt enough to save themselves from elegance.
“I owe him an apology.”
“Yes.”
“That is usually something people are allowed to receive.”
“Receive,” she said. “Not carry.”
I looked toward the empty chair again.
Saar put the bag from the bakery on the table. “Teach less tonight.”
“That is not a plan.”
“It is a beginning.”
She opened the bag and took out rolls, cheese, and two apples as if she had been appointed by a committee to prevent my collapse through carbohydrates.
Elise turned from the wall. “It could be a plan.”
I looked at her.
She pushed her glasses higher on her nose. “If we make it one. Topic rotation. Fifteen minutes per block. Five minutes where no one is allowed to ask James anything until someone else has tried to answer.”
Lotte looked alarmed. “Anyone else?”
“Yes,” Elise said. “Even you.”
“That feels punitive.”
“It is educational.”
Saar’s mouth moved. “Those overlap more often than advertised.”
The room laughed a little. The sound helped because it did not require me.
I stood at the board with the marker in my hand and felt the structure shift under my feet. Elise took the schedule down, rewrote the first hour with a ruler, then taped it again. Saar divided the food without asking permission. Lotte was made responsible for writing questions on a loose sheet instead of interrupting every answer with panic. Two second-row boys were assigned to check each other’s formulas, which produced immediate distrust and then, after three minutes, work.
No one asked whether I agreed, which annoyed me.
For the first fifteen minutes, I said almost nothing. My hands disliked it. They wanted the marker, the diagram, the quick correction, the small rescue at exactly the place where a student began to drown. Renal physiology is full of traps for frightened minds: pressure, concentration, movement, filtration, reabsorption, numbers wearing different hats depending on where they stand. The old way would have been simple. I could have taken the room by the throat gently and led it through the danger.
Instead Lotte answered another student badly, then less badly, then correctly after Elise made her define the word she kept using as camouflage.
I leaned against the wall and watched learning happen without looking like gratitude. Saar passed me a roll.
“I ate,” I said.
“When?”
“Recently.”
“That is a coward’s unit of time.”
I took the roll. At the end of the first hour, one of the second-row boys asked me a question about Starling forces. I answered with one sentence and stopped.
He stared at me. “And?”
“And what do you think follows?”
His face did something unpleasant. Thought, probably.
Elise, from the wall, said, “Finally.”
The room did not collapse. It became slower, rougher. Fewer people looked at me before writing. I noticed how much I noticed.
At the end, when people gathered coats and complained about the schedule while carefully copying it, Saar waited by the door.
“That was better,” she said.
“It was worse.”
“For you.”
I had nothing useful to do with that, so I stacked chairs.
Saar watched two students leave, then spoke more quietly. “Same as last week. You heard it once already.”
The chair in my hands stayed half-lifted.
“Yes,” I said.
She did not look satisfied. “That word again.”
I set the chair down.
“I do not know what you want me to say.”
“I do not want a better sentence. I want you to notice what the sentence does.”
“I am noticing.”
“Good.” She wrapped her scarf around her neck. “Then tomorrow, do something smaller.”
Exams turned time into a corridor with doors placed too close together.
There was anatomy on Monday, physiology on Wednesday, biochemistry waiting at the end of the week with the patience of a tax collector. The university changed under exam weather. Cafés opened earlier. Libraries filled before dawn with students who had discovered too late that panic is not a study method but were willing to test it again. People walked through Leuven carrying folders like shields. The old brick looked the same. That seemed almost rude.
I did well.
That should have comforted me more than it did.
The first exam hall smelled of paper, floor wax, and the particular metal breath of too many nervous bodies. I arrived early. Clean shirt. Dark sweater. Polished shoes because leather lasts longer if a man respects it before it complains. Two pens, one spare, student card, watch, water. The sort of preparation that looks like calm from a distance and compulsion from the inside.
Mathis was not there. His exam was in another group, another hall. Still, I looked for him before sitting.
A girl from the tutoring sessions saw me lay out my pens and asked, “Are you nervous?”
“Yes.”
She looked at my hands. “You don’t look it.”
“I have had practice disappointing appearances.”
She smiled, but not in the way that opened a door. More like someone grateful that steadiness could speak without pretending fear had left the room.
The assistant began handing out papers. I wrote my name, date, and student number in the correct boxes. The old life had given me many useless skills and a few practical ones. Waiting under pressure was one of them. I read the first question twice, answered what was asked, and did not make the paper responsible for my soul.
Halfway through, a diagram of the brachial plexus nearly made me laugh. A week earlier I had sat in my room with lottery paperwork in my coat and failed to make the same branches stay still on the page. Now they lay in front of me obediently, roots and cords and names that could be placed correctly if my hand did not start wanting the answer to mean more than it did.
I wrote. I checked. I changed one answer and left another alone because second-guessing is sometimes only vanity wearing a cautious hat.
When I walked out, students gathered in knots to perform the ritual dissection of suffering.
“What did you put for the posterior cord?” someone asked.
“Please don’t,” Elise said from behind me. “I have decided the exam no longer exists until results make that position legally impossible.”
She had ink on the side of her hand and a look of exhausted triumph.
“You survived,” I said.
“I catalogued the conditions of my survival and will appeal where necessary.”
“That sounds healthy.”
“It is procedural, which is better.”
We walked toward the square. People looked at me now in a way that had changed since September. Less curiosity, more expectation. I had become a man who knew where rooms were likely to fail. I carried spare pens. I remembered dates. I answered accurately when others lost language. I dressed like I expected paper to matter. None of that was glamour. It was more durable and more dangerous.
I watched Elise tuck her schedule into a folder with three paperclips and thought of Mathis not standing beside us.
Lizzy wrote that evening while I was trying to memorize a pathway that seemed to have been designed by someone paid per arrow.
Third year has eaten my life and is now asking for dessert.
I leaned back from the desk and smiled before I had decided whether I was allowed to.
I am only first year. I still believe in institutional mercy.
That is sweet. Wrong, but sweet.
Veterinary medicine sounds hostile.
Her reply took a few minutes. The screen stayed dark long enough for me to return to the pathway and forget one enzyme out of spite.
A horse digestive tract is longer than some marriages and less forgiving.
Gent promised you beauty and animals.
Gent kept the beauty. The animals brought anatomy.
I could hear her voice in the rhythm. Warm, tired, still able to tease while surrounded by pages that probably smelled faintly of coffee and despair. Lizzy had chosen Gent before I had chosen anything properly. At eighteen she had gone toward something difficult with a suitcase and a grin. In the first life, I had made her distance a wound against me. In this one, I was beginning to understand that her life had never been an insult.
The phone moved again.
It is strange that you are behind me now.
I looked at the sentence for a while.
Academically.
Her answer came almost at once.
Yes, James. Academically.
The warmth in it was not simple. It did not ask to be made simple.
I have to go. Fien says if I fail because of you, she will send you a strongly worded drawing of a cow.
Tell Fien I fear her methods.
You should. She gives all her cows judgmental eyebrows.
The last message sat there without needing me to answer. That was a kindness in itself. We had been best friends before I had learned how to be a friend without using silence as a hiding place. Now she was in Gent, third year, tired, alive, surrounded by animals and friends and exams of her own. I put the phone face down and returned to the pathway.
This time, the enzyme stayed.
My mother reached out on Thursday.
The message arrived after physiology, while I was standing outside the hall with my coat over one arm and my head full of pressure curves. The exam had gone well enough. That should have been the day’s headline. Instead the phone moved in my pocket, and my body knew before I looked that the message came from home.
Could you call Sunday afternoon? He is going to your uncle.
I had to read it twice. My mother did not ask for calls. She accepted them. She softened around them. She said maybe, if you have time, when you are not busy, as if my voice were a luxury item she had no right to request. This was different. Could you call. Sunday afternoon. He is going.
I wanted to ask what happened. I wanted to ask whether he had found the transfer, whether the washing machine had become an argument, whether she was safe, whether she needed money, whether she had eaten, whether the house had shifted again around the fact that I existed elsewhere.
The screen waited.
Yes. What time?
Her reply came after a long minute.
Three, if that is all right.
Three is good.
I stood under the university awning while students moved past me into the cold. Someone laughed too loudly near the doors. A bicycle bell rang from the street. The world did not understand that my mother had just done something brave.
On Sunday, I sat at my desk with the phone in front of me before three. I had a folder open beside it because I had been pretending to study. At 14:59, I closed the folder. At 15:00, I called. She answered on the second ring.
“James?”
“Hi, Mum.”
“Is this still a good time?”
“Yes.”
“I did not want to disturb your studying.”
“You are not disturbing me.”
There was a small silence, the kind that felt like a room being checked before entering.
“He went to your uncle,” she said.
“I know.”
“He will be back around five, I think. Unless they talk about football. Then later.”
“That gives us time.”
“Yes.”
I waited. Every instinct in me wanted to make the waiting easier by filling it. I put my free hand flat on the desk and let the wood hold some of the effort.
“I wanted to ask about papers,” she said.
“What kind?”
“Receipts. Bank things. The washing machine. The repair before. The transfer you made.” Her voice lowered slightly on the last sentence, though there was no one in the room to hear it. “I thought maybe I should keep copies. Of things. Just in case.”
The words were small. She had placed them carefully where I could see them.
“Yes,” I said.
Too quickly.
I stopped myself before yes became a plan with walls and exits and my name on every door.
“That is a good idea,” I said, more slowly.
“What should I keep?”
“Anything with dates. Receipts. Bank statements if you have them. Repair invoices. Warranty papers. Anything that shows what was bought, when, and by whom.”
“I do not have all of it.”
“That is all right.”