Midnight in the Boardroom

Lark Okafor has one job this year: keep her fellowship. That means assisting the new executive-in-residence, a man she has publicly called a fraud in a seminar she was not supposed to be teaching. Roman Ashcroft built his reputation on being right. At forty-four, he is on campus for reasons he refuses to explain, and the first thing he does is get corrected in front of ninety students by a first-year who is not wrong. He is her boss. She is his assistant. The university has rules about that, and neither of them is the type to break a rule for no reason. Then he tells her why he came to Halcyon, and the reason has a name and a date attached to it, and the rules matter much less than they did yesterday. When the inquiry opens, someone has to walk away from the life they built. The problem is that neither of them is willing to let the other be the one who does it.