The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 22: The Letter
The result was posted on a sheet of paper taped crookedly behind glass.
That was all the ceremony the year offered.
Students pressed close in layers, shoulders touching, breath held badly, everyone pretending not to push while pushing. Someone swore. Someone laughed. Someone said a prayer in a voice meant only for the bureaucracy of heaven. The glass reflected our faces back over the list, pale and stretched and younger than we felt.
I waited because forcing my way forward would not change the number.
My right hand still ached from the last exam. A small blister had opened on the side of my middle finger where the pen had sat through too many hours of pretending that knowledge could be made visible quickly enough. I rubbed my thumb over it and stopped when the sting made me feel childish.
A year ago, or close enough that the difference felt like accounting, my hands had been softer, slower, less mine. They had pulled sour sheets from a bed in the room that raised me badly. They had shaken around a toothbrush and too much detergent. They had written the first numbers in a notebook because numbers were easier to trust than promises. Now they hurt from an exam I had finished.
When the crowd shifted, my name appeared between two others.
Vandael, James.
Geslaagd.
Weighted percentage: 91.1.
For a moment the corridor narrowed to that decimal.
The university did not hand out final words after one year. No degree. No title. No ceremonial Latin placed around the neck like a ribbon. Those words belonged to endings, and this was not an ending.
But the categories were there, waiting further down the road. Cum laude. Magna. Summa. Summa with the congratulations of the examination committee, if a man held above ninety long enough for the institution to stop treating it as an accident.
The number knew where it was pointing.
I read it again because numbers were safest when they remained numbers.
91.1.
A year earlier, I had been a dead old man opening his eyes in a room that smelled of sour sheets. Before that, I had been a boy who failed one exam so completely that he gave the rest of his wanting to the army and called the surrender discipline. Now a crooked sheet behind glass said I had done something difficult well enough that people would file me differently.
That should have been joy.
It was joy, in part.
It was also exposure.
“You are going to become unbearable,” Hanne said beside me.
I had not heard her arrive.
“I was already difficult.”
“Yes, but now there is documentation.”
Mathis appeared on my other side, hair damp from sweat or weather or panic. He scanned the list with the desperation of a man looking for a pulse.
Then his whole body changed.
“I passed,” he said.
“I see that.”
“Barely.”
“Barely counts.”
He kept staring at the list, as if it might change its mind. “I don’t care. I passed.”
“Accept mercy when it has your name spelled correctly.”
He nodded slowly, then looked at my number. His face passed through horror, admiration, and offence in less than two seconds.
“You passed by violence.”
Hanne laughed.
Elise arrived late, because Elise believed crowds should have the decency to arrange themselves before she entered them. She found her name, read her mark, and exhaled through her nose.
“Well?” Hanne asked.
“I passed.”
“Congratulations.”
“I lost a point where I should not have lost a point.”
“So you passed well.”
Elise looked at her. “I am aware of the vulgar summary.”
Then she saw my result.
“Ninety-one,” she said.
“It is only first year.”
“That is exactly what makes it irritating.”
Saar came last. She read the list without changing expression. Her own name sat safely where it needed to sit. Passed. Good marks. Not spectacular, not careless. Hers.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“You too.”
“Thank you.”
She looked at the sheet again, then at me. “Do not start believing marks make you right.”
“I was going to wait until second year.”
“No,” she said. “You were not.”
Then she walked away toward the stairs, leaving Hanne delighted and Mathis visibly reassured that someone could still insult me after ninety-one percent.
I stayed a little longer after the others moved off. The corridor thinned. New faces came, found joy or damage, left. The paper remained behind glass. It did not know what it had done. It had no opinion on old rooms, fathers, bodies, women, money, or the moral danger of becoming competent.
It only had a number.
That was why I trusted it and distrusted myself around it.
Marieke read the result in the café near the hospital because I handed her the paper copy and did not know what else to do with my hands.
She had lab work that afternoon, hair pinned badly, dark circles under her eyes, and a coffee beside her that looked more medicinal than enjoyable. Her own folder sat beside the cup, closed. London had not answered yet. The folder looked innocent in the way sealed things do before they learn they are dangerous.
She read once, then again.
“Ninety-one point one,” she said.
“Yes.”
She looked up. “That is not first-year behaviour.”
“I am trying to remain administratively young.”
“You are failing.”
“I passed.”
The corner of her mouth moved. “Yes. That too.”
She put the paper down, but her fingers stayed on it. I knew that touch. The same way she held articles, letters, applications, anything that might open or close a future.
“At the end,” she said, “if you keep this, they will have to use the long category.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“It has too many words to forget.”
“Summa cum laude with the congratulations of the examination committee,” she said, in English, with a faint twist of amusement at the ceremony of it. “Ridiculous.”
“Yes.”
“Also deserved, if you do not ruin yourself trying to prove it twice.”
I took the paper back and folded it. “That is almost praise.”
“It is praise with supervision.”
“Your preferred genre.”
She smiled then, but the smile faded before it settled.
“What?” I asked.
“You make it look like proof.”
“It is proof.”
“Of work. Of intelligence. Of memory. Of discipline.” She tapped the paper once. “Not of being all right.”
“No.”
She leaned back, tired enough not to sharpen the sentence further. That made it feel kinder.
“I am proud of you,” she said.
The words were plain. That made them harder to defend against.
“Thank you.”
“And I am annoyed.”
“That is more familiar.”
“You are becoming visible very quickly.”
“Yes.”
“Visibility is not the same as being known.”
“No.”
She studied me over the coffee. “Do not use one to avoid the other.”
I could have joked. I did not.
“I am trying not to.”
“I know.” She took the paper from me again, unfolded it, and looked at the number once more. “Still. Ninety-one.”
“You sound surprised.”
“No.” She folded it carefully, better than I had. “I sound like I am recalculating the scale of the problem.”
The line should have been funny. It was, almost. Then she looked at her closed folder and the humour went out of it.
“Nothing yet?” I asked.
“No.”
“You would tell me.”
She looked up quickly.
“I am asking,” I said, before she could decide I had arranged the answer for her.
Her face softened by a fraction. “Yes. I would tell you.”
“Good.”
“It may be nothing.”
“It is not nothing.”
“No,” she said. “It is not.”
For a while we drank bad coffee and said ordinary things badly. She had a culture issue in the lab. I had a notary appointment in three days. Peeters had sent another estimate. Her supervisor had written a sentence so bureaucratic that she suspected it had been born in a basement. I told her about Mathis passing by mercy. She smiled properly at that.
Outside, June was bright on the stones. Students moved through the square as if the year had released them into a country they had forgotten existed.
I had passed.
The building was almost mine.
Her letter had not arrived.
The three facts sat at the table with us and behaved like strangers pretending not to know each other.
The building became mine in the least romantic way possible: signatures, fees, taxes, clauses, and a woman reading aloud from pages no one in the room loved.
The final deed took place three days after the results. The notary’s office was too warm. Mrs. Claes sat beside me with a file so orderly it made everyone else look morally unprepared. Peeters stood near the window, present because the repair schedule had already begun breeding consequences. Van Acker arrived exactly on time, which was his way of refusing enthusiasm.
He wore the same coat as before, though the weather had no use for it. His hair was combed back. His hands looked clean in a way that suggested recent argument with soap rather than friendship.
“You look rested,” he said.
“I am not.”
“Good. Owners who sleep too well become careless.”
Mrs. Claes glanced at him over her glasses. “Mr. Van Acker.”
“What? I am congratulating him.”
“You are warning him.”
“That is the honest version.”
The notary entered before Mrs. Claes could decide whether honesty needed filing.
The reading began.
The bank’s part was confirmed. The transfer was confirmed. The insurance documents were named. The reserve remained exactly large enough to be respectable and too small to be comforting. The price was no longer a number in a conversation but a fact that had moved through systems and left signatures behind. Two hundred seventy-eight thousand euros had become debt, ownership, exposure, and a building with old pipes.
I signed where told.
This time the pen did not feel like a weapon or a promise.
It felt like a pen.
That was enough.
Van Acker signed after me. His hand was slower than I expected. Practical men still know when something leaves them. He pushed the papers back, then reached into the pocket of his coat and produced a ring of keys large enough to belong to a prison guard or a saint with complicated responsibilities.
He placed them on the table between us.
“They all work,” he said. “Except when they don’t.”
Peeters coughed into his hand.
The notary pretended not to hear.
I picked up the keys. They were heavier than the repair key had been.
Not symbolically.
Actually.
Labels, brass, worn edges, one newer copy too sharp at the teeth. Front door. Back door. Basement. Meter room. Roof hatch. Apartment one. Two. Three. Storage. A key with no label that Van Acker claimed was important and could not remember why.
“You will find out,” he said, standing, “that buildings are cheaper before they are yours.”
“I already suspected.”
“No,” he said. “Suspicion is free.”
Then he shook my hand. His palm was dry, grip firm, no extra pressure. He looked at me for a second as if trying to decide whether I was old enough to disappoint him properly.
“Do not paint before you fix water,” he said.
“I know.”
“Everyone says that.”
He nodded to Mrs. Claes, ignored the notary’s attempt at a formal goodbye, and left with the careful dignity of a man who refused to be seen lingering after a sale.
The room felt larger after he was gone and less useful.
Mrs. Claes gathered her papers. “Congratulations,” she said.
The word sounded different from her than from anyone else. It had passed through documentation first.
“Thank you.”
“Your reserve remains tight.”
“I know.”
“The bank likes to be thanked by not being surprised.”
“I will try to remain dull.”
She gave me a look that suggested this was already unlikely.
Outside, the street was bright. Peeters stood beside me while I held the keys and failed to do anything useful with them.
“You want to see it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then come. Owners who stare at keys in public become sentimental. It damages judgement.”
The building did not greet me.
That was one of its better qualities.
The front door stuck on the first try, opened on the second, and released the smell of old stairs, warm dust, drains, and cooking from somewhere above. The hallway looked narrower now that it belonged to me. Ownership did not enlarge things. It removed excuses from them.
Peeters walked ahead with the clipboard. “Sequence,” he said.
“I have one.”
“I know. I saw it. It was optimistic in three places and expensive in all of them.”
“That is not a technical critique.”
“It is the only critique buildings respect.”
We went through the list. It had not gotten shorter since Peeters wrote it. He said paint last twice, once while looking at me and once while looking at the wall, in case the wall was the weak one.
Anja’s room was warmer. She opened the door with a textbook in one hand and a pen behind her ear.
“New owner,” Peeters said.
Anja looked at me. “Same face.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Less administration.”
She let us inspect the radiator valve, which no longer knocked. Then she asked about the window again. I gave her the scheduled week. She nodded, wrote it in the margin of whatever she was studying, and shut the door.
On the stairs, Peeters looked amused. “She likes you.”
“That was liking?”
“For tenants? Deep affection.”
Koen was out, but his window sat in the list like a promise already late. Apartment three had a loose handle and a smell of fried onions. The roof hatch resisted the key until Peeters swore at it in a way that seemed to help. From the roof, Leuven spread around us in brick, slate, church towers, and late-June light. The city did not know I owned a few tired rooms inside it. That was comforting.
Peeters stood beside me, hands in his pockets.
“You look pleased,” he said.
“I am.”
“Good. Enjoy it for an hour. Then read the inspection report again.”
“I have read it.”
“Read it now that it is yours.”