The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 18: The Longer Version
By March, the missing button had returned to my shirt.
It had not returned well. Marieke had used black thread on dark blue cotton and had fastened it with the grim concentration of a woman who believed a task could be bullied into competence. The button sat a little higher than the others and pulled the cloth wrong when I lifted my arm. She had inspected it afterward, frowned, and said, “Structurally offensive, but attached.”
I wore the shirt twice before she noticed.
“Sentimental,” she said.
“Economical.”
“Coward.”
She looked pleased when I did not deny it.
That was how February entered March: a repaired button, one extra toothbrush in a glass that belonged to neither of us, my name in the margin of her calendar beside dinner, and a paper on reperfusion injury left on my desk because she had found my earlier notes “less wrong than expected.” We had slept in the same bed three more times and once only slept, which felt stranger and perhaps more dangerous. She still corrected my definitions. I still tried not to turn every correction into work too quickly.
The building remained folded into my bag.
The notary wanted contract copies signed in a sequence that made sense only to other notaries. Mrs. Claes wanted the reserve separated from the deposit in a way the bank could admire without trusting me.
Peeters sent a short note about damp at the back stairwell and then, two days later, a repair quote for Koen’s window that made hallway paint a problem for a richer and less ethical man. I put the window at the top of the list. The corridor could remain ugly. Cold air in a tenant’s room was not character.
When I told Van Acker, he grunted over the phone.
“You have not bought the building yet.”
“No.”
“Then do not start loving it in ways that cost money.”
“I thought you preferred buyers who understood repairs.”
“I prefer buyers who sign.”
The line crackled. Somewhere behind him a woman said something I could not make out.
“You want the window done before transfer?” he asked.
“I want the quote accepted and the timing clear. If it becomes mine, it is first.”
“Paint second?”
“Paint can wait.”
He made another sound, less dismissive this time. “Buildings punish men who like paint.”
“I am learning.”
“Then learn faster.” He checked his watch and did not add anything to it.
He hung up before I could answer.
Marieke had the papers spread across her desk when I arrived that Friday.
Her room had changed since the seminar without becoming tidier. Articles were stacked by urgency rather than subject. A mug held two pencils, one pen, and a hairpin. The calendar lay open with three crossed-out reminders and my name written in a hand that looked as if she had resented the curve of every letter. Beside the lamp sat three folders.
Rotterdam.
Zürich.
London.
The last one was thicker. I looked at it too long.
“Do not start with your face,” she said.
“I thought I had improved control of it.”
“You have improved control of the obvious parts.”
She was wearing a grey sweater with the sleeves pushed to her elbows. Her hair was pinned badly. There was ink on the side of one finger and tiredness under both eyes. The sight of the London folder beside her hand made the desk look smaller.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Rotterdam said yes in principle,” she said. “Six months. Sensible, according to De Smet, which is how he says small when he wants me angry.”
“And Zürich?”
“Waiting on funding. Keller thinks the equipment window may open in autumn, but Keller thinks in protocols and weather systems. He does not promise anything without a table attached.”
“And London?”
She did not answer at once. London did something small and old at the back of my mind.
Marieke turned the folder so I could see the top page.
“London is the longer version.”
The words did not sound dramatic.
I sat in the chair by the desk. She had cleared it before I came, though not entirely. A loose article remained under one leg, lifting the chair by half a millimetre. I noticed because I wanted something small enough to understand.
“How long?” I asked.
“The clean answer is twelve months.”
“And the unclean one?”
“Review after nine. Possible continuation if the data supports the project and the funding survives committee enthusiasm.”
“Clinical research?”
“Linked to the cardiology group there. Reperfusion, measurement windows, patient data once I have earned the right to be more than decoration in the room.”
“You would not be decoration.”
“No,” she said. “That does not mean they know it yet.”
She sat on the edge of the desk, between Rotterdam and London, as if she had placed herself exactly where the choice could not avoid her.
“De Smet thinks London is the real one,” I said.
“De Smet thinks the others are sensible.”
“That sounds like yes.”
“It sounds like De Smet.”
She picked up the London folder, then put it down again.
“Rotterdam is six months,” she said. “Clear start, clear end. I could come back before the year becomes something else.”
“Zürich?”
“Pressure. Better equipment. Less clean because of funding, but still something that looks like a placement if you squint politely.”
“And London is not a placement.”
“It is a track.”
The word sat there with the weight of rails. I looked at her hands. She had the London cover letter under one palm, fingers flat, as if she was preventing the paper from moving before she had decided whether it was allowed to live.
“Do you want it?” I asked.
Her mouth tightened.
“I dislike that question.”
“I know.”
“You ask it as if the answer should behave once spoken.”
“I am asking because I do not know.”
That made her look at me. The light from the window was thin and almost colourless. Rain had left the glass marked in dull vertical lines. Below, someone’s bicycle bell rang twice and stopped. Marieke looked older than she had the first night I saw her in the café, and younger too, in the places ambition had not yet learned how to protect.
“Yes,” she said.
I nodded because speech would have tried to fix something.
She watched me fail to speak and seemed to approve only slightly.
“Good,” she said. “Now make coffee.”
“That is a sharp turn.”
“It is a kettle, James. Survive it.”
The kettle clicked on with a sound too ordinary for the future it had been asked to accompany.
The London application was cleaner than she believed and less honest than she wanted.
I mean that as description rather than criticism. Documents ask people to sell the part of themselves least suited to sale. The first paragraph described her current work. The second named the clinical link. The third attempted to explain why the longer track mattered without sounding as if she wanted too much.
That was where I made my mistake.
We had moved to the table because her desk could no longer hold the papers and both our elbows. She sat opposite me, knees tucked beneath the chair, coffee cooling near her right hand. I had a pencil. She had warned me not to use a pen.
“Read,” she said.
“I am reading.”
“You are reading with posture.”
“I do most things with posture.”
“Yes. It is one of your evasions.”
I went back to the page. Her sentence read: I hope to contribute to the project by extending my current work on reperfusion injury into a clinically grounded framework.
I circled hope. Marieke’s eyes lifted.
“It is weak,” I said.
“I know what it is.”
“I would write intend.”
“You would.”
The warning was there. I heard it and kept going because correctness has a way of borrowing the voice of necessity.
“Hope makes you sound grateful for permission. Intend makes you sound like someone who has already accepted the cost.”
She sat back.
I should have stopped.
I did not.
“This paragraph should move before the methods section. If they read the clinical frame first, the data question lands harder. And this part here, where you mention your supervisor, you are giving De Smet too much weight. The sentence should be yours. Something like, My current work has led me toward questions that require a larger patient-linked dataset. That is stronger.”
“It is cleaner,” she said.
I marked another line.
“And here, if the continuation is possible after nine months, the letter should not treat twelve months as an inconvenience. You should make it sound like the logical form of the work.”
“James.”
I looked up. Her face had closed, but not in the cold way. Worse. In the careful way.
“What?” I asked.
“Do not fix the sentence before I decide if I mean it.”
The pencil became heavy in my hand.
“I was editing,” I said.
“Yes.”
The word did not accuse. It did not need to.
I looked at the page again. My circles, my arrows, my clean replacement sentence in the margin. All of it useful. All of it competent. All of it pressing her toward the harder version in language she had not yet chosen for herself.
I set the pencil down. Marieke did not soften.
“You are good at making things stronger,” she said.
“That sounds less like praise than usual.”
“It is not praise.”
“No.”
“You see the structure. You see where a thing can bear weight. You put your hands under it before anyone asks whether they want it lifted.”
I looked at her. She held my eyes for one second, then looked back at the letter. Her mouth moved slightly, as if she disliked that she had said exactly what she meant.
“The sentence is weak,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I may still need to write it weak first.”
I nodded. The apology rose. A clean one. A well-shaped one. I could feel it arranging itself in my mouth, offering recognition and consequence and enough humility to make the scene easier for both of us.
I did not say it. Instead I pushed the page back toward her.
Marieke took it. For a while only paper moved. She crossed out hope herself, then did not write intend. She wrote want and stared at it for long enough that the coffee went cold.
I sat there with my hands empty. That was harder than helping.
After ten minutes she said, “Make yourself useful without touching my sentences.”
I stood. “Coffee?”
“Water first. Coffee after I have decided whether I am lying.”
I filled two glasses from the small sink down the hall. When I came back, she had written a new line beneath the old one. I did not read it until she turned the page toward me.
My current work has led me to questions that I cannot answer honestly without a larger clinical frame.
It was not my sentence. It was less smooth. It had a small hard truth in it that my version had polished away.
“Better,” I said.
Her eyes lifted.
I corrected myself. “More yours.”
“That is not always the same thing.”
“No.”
She looked down again, but the corner of her mouth moved. She picked up the pencil and crossed out another line, then wrote in the margin with the quick angled hand she used when she had stopped asking permission from the page.
For nearly an hour, she worked and I did almost nothing. I sharpened the pencil once. I held the older pages in order. I made coffee and did not comment when she forgot to drink it. Outside, rain began with the faint dry sound it makes before the street accepts it.
At one point she reached across the table and put her hand over mine. It was not apology. It was not thanks. Her fingers were cold from the glass.
“You are allowed to help,” she said.
“I know.”
“No. You are allowed to help after I choose the weight.”
I turned my hand under hers, palm to palm. “I can learn that.”
“You can learn almost anything. That is part of the danger.”
She left her hand there for three breaths, then took it back and returned to the page.
The next afternoon, Peeters met me at the building with a folding rule, a camera, and the expression of a man prepared to be disappointed by wood.
Van Acker had sent a key through his wife, which meant he had agreed without wanting to be present for the agreement. The hallway smelled of old stone, floor polish, damp plaster, and the cabbage someone had cooked two apartments above us. Peeters looked at the stairs, then at me.
“You still want this?”
“That is a cruel question in a hallway.”
Koen opened his door before I knocked. He was in socks, with a textbook open on the table behind him and a blanket over the back of a chair. The window in his room had been packed along one edge with folded newspaper and brown tape. It was a practical failure pretending to be a repair.
“Mr. Vandael,” he said, then looked embarrassed because I was not old enough to deserve it.
“James is fine.”
He nodded without using it.
Peeters crossed to the window, pressed two fingers to the frame, and made a sound that would have frightened a lesser piece of wood.
“How long has it been like this?” he asked.
Koen looked at the floor. “Winter.”
“Which winter?”
The answer stayed in the room without being spoken. I looked at the desk, the neat stack of course notes, the cheap electric heater angled toward the chair. The heater was off. Either he was saving electricity or afraid of asking whether the bill would be blamed on him. Both possibilities made the same place in my chest tighten.
Peeters took measurements. Koen watched as if a man writing numbers might summon a bill he could not pay.
“This is not cosmetic,” Peeters said to me.
“I know.”
“Frame needs work. Glass can stay if you want cheap. I would not want cheap.”
Koen’s face changed by a fraction.
“Do it properly,” I said.
Peeters nodded and wrote. “Paint later?”
“Paint later.”
Koen looked at me. “You have not bought it yet.”
“You all keep reminding me.”
“It is just...” He stopped.
“What?”
“If it does not happen, he will say I made trouble.”
Van Acker did not need to be in the room to take up space.
“I will not use your name in the quote,” I said. “It will say front room, second floor. If the sale fails, I will still have the paper.”
Koen nodded once. It was not relief exactly. More like permission not to apologize for being cold.
Downstairs, Peeters put the camera back in its case.
“That is the first repair?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I see many men buy buildings from the front door inward.”
“The front door does not sleep there.”
He looked at me for a moment. “Remember that when the bank asks why your reserve is smaller.”
“I will.”
“You will want to sound clever.”
“That is possible.”
“Do not. Say heat leaves through rotten windows and students pay rent to live inside, not beside, a room.”
He closed the case.
It was the most generous thing he had said to me, and he made it sound like a complaint.
Gent returned on a Saturday with low clouds and the smell of wet stone.
I had not been since the previous autumn, when Lizzy had walked beside me through streets that belonged more to her than they ever had to me. Back then, Gent had been a question I did not answer. Now I arrived with Marieke beside me on the train and felt the city rearrange its old furniture without asking permission.
Lizzy had suggested the café after her veterinary practical because, in her words, she wanted to sit somewhere that did not smell like disinfectant, animal breath, and academic despair. Fien had added, through Lizzy’s phone, that no such place existed but fries could help.
Marieke read an article for half the journey and pretended not to study my reflection in the window.
“You are nervous,” she said near Wetteren.
“I am trying not to arrange the afternoon.”
“That is a yes in longer clothing.”
I looked at the fields moving past under March light. “Lizzy matters.”
“I had guessed.”
“And Gent matters to her.”
“And I am entering it.”
“Yes.”
She turned one page and did not read it.
“Good,” she said.
That was all.
The café stood on a side street off a busier square, with a narrow front, brown tables, a floor that had learned to survive students, and windows fogged by rain and conversation. It was the sort of place where no chair matched another and no one seemed to mind.
Lizzy was already there when we arrived, one arm resting on the back of the chair beside her, hair tied up badly, cheeks still flushed from the cold. Fien sat opposite her with a paper cone of fries and the pleased exhaustion of a woman who had survived something absurd and intended to make everyone hear about it.
Lizzy saw me first. Her smile came quickly, then changed when she saw Marieke beside me. It did not shrink. It became more careful and more generous at the same time.
“James,” she said.
“Lizzy.”