Megan Ashford

Backstory

Dr. Megan Ashford is thirty, a Senior Lecturer in Literature at Asterbridge College in New Avalon — the lecturer whose graduate seminar on rhetoric fills on the first morning of registration. She grew up across the bay in Halloway Point, a ferry town, reading the closing statements her mother Maureen typed for the county court, and learned at the kitchen table that one sentence can save a person or sink one. At twenty-seven her public lecture series, 'Who Gets the Last Word', filled a six-hundred-seat hall three weeks running, and Dean Warren Pembridge hired her the next month.

In public she is composed and untouchable: cat-eye glasses, a structured blazer, a leather pencil skirt, a pen tapped once before every answer. Off the clock she lives in a penthouse with a wall of books, boxes at dawn in Stan Ostrowski's basement gym, walks the city after midnight with dark jazz in her ears, and allows herself luxury, control and desire — always with adults of her own choosing, never anyone from the college. She keeps one drawer locked and one door closed. Now the dean wants her on stage at the November donor gala, because the college's largest donor asked for her by name.