Wray’s seminar met Tuesdays at four in a room on the third floor of Ansell with twelve chairs, a table the color of strong tea, and a fireplace nobody had lit in forty years. In winter the radiators made the room smell faintly of hot dust and the windows went blue at four-thirty and then black by five, so that the last half hour of every session happened in a lamp-lit box floating above the quad. Frances had loved that room the way other people love a church, and for the rest of her life she would not be able to smell hot dust without something in her chest performing a small unauthorized movement.

He came in at four with the papers under his arm.

He always brought them back the following Tuesday; that was the arrangement, that was the pleasure — a week of not knowing, and then the hour where he took the week’s argument apart in front of everyone, and you defended it, and the room got very quiet and very fast. Meg Ferriday had cried in that room in October and come out of it beaming, because he’d fought her for twenty minutes, and being fought by Wray was the currency.

He set the stack on the table and did not touch it for fifty minutes.

Instead he taught the letters. Keats to his brothers, December of 1817, the famous one, and he read the passage aloud in that unhurried voice with the fireplace behind him, about the quality that goes to form a Man of Achievement: capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

“Negative capability,” he said. “Which is a terrible name for it. He was twenty-two and he made it up in a letter he never expected anyone to read.” He looked around the table with a kind of pleasant menace. “So. What does it cost a reader to do this? Not a poet — a reader. What does it actually cost you to sit in front of a text and not resolve it?”

Around the table they said the things you say. Frances said something about the Grecian urn that she was pleased with at the time and could not, thirty years later, remember a word of. She remembered instead that Wray listened to her with his chin down and his eyes up and did not respond, and moved on, and that she felt the smallest wire of unease go through her and dismissed it, because he was saving her. Obviously he was saving her. Forty-one pages of prosecution were sitting in that stack and he was saving her for last.

At ten to five he handed the papers back. He went around the table, one at a time, a word or two for each, the way he always did.

When he got to Frances he put hers face-down in front of her and said, “I’d like you to come and see me. Any time this week. Any time at all.”

And moved on.

She sat there in the lamp-lit box above the quad while the room emptied around her, chairs scraping, someone laughing in the hall, and did not turn the paper over. Meg said something to her on the way out and she answered it and had no idea what either of them had said. Wray gathered his things and paused at the door, and she felt him pause, and she kept her eyes on the back of the last page, and after a moment he went.

It was in the stairwell that she turned it over.

B+, in the fading red he used because black ink was for lawyers.

That was all it was, for one second. A letter and a symbol. She actually laughed — one flat syllable that came out of her in the stairwell and bounced up the shaft — because it was so small, because you could hold all of it in a quarter inch of paper. Her ears were ringing. That was interesting. She had never known that could happen from a letter of the alphabet.

Then she saw the comment.

He had written it in the right-hand margin of the final page, small and level, the way he wrote everything, running down the length of the sheet and turning at the bottom to finish along the base:

You are not reading Wordsworth. You are mourning Keats. Every poem in this paper has been made to testify at a trial it never attended. Until you can tell the difference between reading a text and grieving through one, you are a mourner, not a critic — and the tragedy is that you may be the most gifted mourner I have ever taught.

She read it standing up in a stairwell between the third floor and the second, in the smell of wet wool and radiator dust, with people going past her on both sides.

Here is what she understood, immediately, entirely, in the first four seconds, without any of the mercy that comes from arguing:

He was right.

Everything after that was housekeeping. She read it again to see if it would be less right the second time. She got as far as a trial it never attended and had to stop, because that was the sentence, that was the one — she could see the whole paper from that sentence, the way you see a building from across a river, all forty-one pages of it, every quotation she had summoned and put in the box and made to answer for a crime committed in Rome in 1821. She had spent four months building a courtroom. She had thought she was building an argument. He had read it in one evening and named the thing she was doing before she had any idea she was doing it, and he had named it kindly, which was unbearable, because a cruel man you can survive.

the most gifted mourner I have ever taught.

The line ran to the bottom edge of the page and stopped.

And she saw — she was a reader, she noticed everything, that was the entire problem with her — the ghost of more writing showing faintly through the back of the sheet. Red ink is thin. It bleeds. There was another paragraph on the other side, four or five lines of it, right there under her thumb.

She looked at the shape of it through the paper for a moment.

Then she shut the paper in her bag and went down the stairs and out into the cold, and did not turn it over.

Not that afternoon. Not that week. Not that year.

Sofia found her at eleven that night sitting on the floor of 2-C in the dark with her coat still on.

Sofia did not say what happened or oh my God or any of it. She turned off the overhead, which Frances had not registered was on, and got down on the floor with her back against the door in her Hartford Whalers sweatshirt, and waited about five minutes, which for Sofia Hollan was a monastic feat.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Say it.”

And Frances said it. All of it, in one go, in the dark, in the voice you use for reciting something you have already read forty times in your head — you are not reading Wordsworth, you are mourning Keats, every poem in this paper has been made to testify at a trial it never attended — all the way down to the end, to the mourner, to the gifted, to the taught. She had it word for word after five hours. She would have it word for word after thirty years. It went into her the way a splinter goes in, at an angle, under the skin, past the reach of anything.

Sofia said nothing for a bit.

“What’d he give you?”

“B plus.”

“For that? He wrote you a letter and gave you a B plus?”

“It’s what it earned.”

“Fan.”

“It’s what it earned, Sofia, that’s the whole—” She stopped, because her voice had gone somewhere she didn’t want it going in front of anyone, even Sofia, even in the dark.

The radiator ticked. Down the hall someone was playing the same forty seconds of a song over and over, learning it.

“Can I say the wrong thing,” Sofia said.

“You always say the wrong thing.”

“I’m going to say the wrong thing.” A pause. “It’s a really nice letter.”

Frances put her head back against the bed frame.

“I know it’s not,” Sofia said, “I know it’s not, to you, I get that it isn’t. But I’m the dumb one in this room about all of this and I’m telling you what it sounds like from out here. A guy read your paper and he told you what you’re actually doing. Nobody’s ever done that for me in my life and I’ve been in school for sixteen years. That’s not a — Fan, that’s not a sentence, that’s a—”

“He said I’m not a critic.”

“He said you’re something else.”

“He said I’m the best mourner he’s ever taught. Do you know what that is? It’s a nice way to say I’m a tourist. It’s a nice way to say every real thought I’ve ever had was grief wearing a hat.” She was crying now, finally, in the flat furious way she cried, without any of the sounds. “I have been reading these people since I was fifteen. It’s the only thing I’m good at. And he read forty-one pages and he found out that the whole time, the entire time, I wasn’t reading anything at all. I was just—”

She didn’t finish it.

Sofia said, “He asked you to come see him. You said that. He asked twice.”

“Yes.”

“So go see him.”

“Yeah,” said Frances.

She never went.

She left Carrow eleven days later, three months short of a degree.

There was no scene. That was the part nobody ever believed, afterward, in the rare years when she told any of it: she didn’t burn anything or say anything memorable to anyone or stand in the quad shouting at a window. She filed the withdrawal form in the registrar’s office on a Tuesday morning at nine-fifteen, and the woman behind the counter asked if she was transferring and Frances said not exactly, and the woman stamped it.

Wray sent one note to her mailbox. She recognized the red before she recognized anything else and she put it, unopened, into the bag with the paper.

Sofia drove her home. It took two hours and eleven minutes and Sofia talked for most of it — about her uncle’s firm, about a guy named Dennis, about a stereo she wanted — talked steadily and easily and without one single question, which was, Frances understood much later, the kindest sustained act of her entire life. Somewhere around Sturbridge she reached over without looking and put her hand flat on Frances’s forearm for about three seconds and then put it back on the wheel and kept talking about the stereo.

At the house they carried in the boxes. The last one had the books in it, and the legal pad with the block capitals on the front and a sentence about a woman going upstairs written on the back in the dark, and a manila envelope with forty-one pages in it, and a smaller unopened envelope, and Sofia set it down in the front hall and straightened up and looked at it.

“You want me to take that one,” she said. Not really a question. “I’ll put it in my parents’ attic. You’ll never see it. It’ll just be somewhere.”

“No,” Frances said. “I’ve got it.”

She kept it. It went into a closet in her mother’s house and then into four other closets across thirty years and two marriages and one glass house on a granite shelf in Maine, and it never got opened, and there was one more paragraph on the back of page forty-one, and one unopened note in a red-inked hand, and both of them sat in the dark in a box for three decades waiting for a woman who was never, ever coming.

There was exactly one person on this earth she told what was written in that margin.

And in June of 2004, on Route 9 outside of Hadley, at four in the afternoon on a clear day, that person’s car came out of a curve into the side of a truck that had run its light, and everything Sofia Hollan knew went with her, and Frances did not go to the funeral.