I hung up and stood in the kitchen for a moment.
Then I picked up my phone and found the contact I had been thinking about for several days.
It rang twice.
“Hello?” said a voice I hadn’t heard in six years.
“Dr.
Okafor,” I said.
“This is Claire.
I was in your first-year cohort.
Dr.
Okafor’s office was exactly as I remembered it.
The same wall of textbooks.
The same framed diagram of the cardiovascular system above the filing cabinet.
The same slightly too-bright overhead light that he had always meant to replace with something warmer and apparently never had.
He looked older.
So did I, probably.
“Sit down, Claire,” he said.
I sat.
“I pulled your file after you called,” he said.
He had a folder open on the desk.
“Your grades when you left were strong.
Your first-year evaluations were strong.
The note on your withdrawal says personal and financial circumstances.” He looked up.
“Do you want to tell me more about that now?”
“My husband needed to complete his degree,” I said.
“I left to support that.”
Dr.
Okafor was quiet for a moment.
“And now?”
“The circumstances have changed.”
He looked back at the file.
“You’ve been out for six years.
Re-entry at this stage isn’t a simple process.
You’d need to sit the re-entry assessment.
There may be coursework you’d need to revisit depending on your scores.
You’d be starting behind your original cohort.”
“I understand that.”
“It would likely be two to three years before you’d be where you would have been if you’d stayed.” He paused.
“That doesn’t discourage you?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m thirty-one.
In three years I’ll be thirty-four either way.”
Something shifted in his expression.
Not quite a smile.
The expression of a man who had heard that logic before and still found it correct.
“The re-entry assessment has two sittings per year,” he said.
“The next one is in eleven weeks.”
“I know.
I looked it up before I called you.”
He closed the folder.
“I can’t promise you a place.
