Page 3 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"Those are compatible claims."

"Wrong how?"

"You argue that consolation is what philosophy offers when it can't offer rescue." He looked at me over the fog-colored glass, and there was the lamp again, on behind the curtain, burning. "You assume the two are different."

I opened my mouth. I closed it. Somewhere in my chest, an entire semester's lecture notes quietly rearranged themselves.

"Okay," I said. "That's—we're going to need a longer conversation."

"Evidently."

"I'll hold you to that. I hold people to things. I write them down."

"So I understand," he said, and I still don't know what he meant by it, and item seven hadn't even been written yet.

"You're in Corbett House," he said then, the way you say a thing you have already filed. Croft's trick, apparently, going all the way up.

"Third floor. Nice view of a building that isn't there."

That got a pause. Half a second. If I hadn't already been watching his face like a final exam I'd have missed it.

"The fog," he said, "sits on the east side most evenings, this time of year. You'll stop noticing it."

"Noted," I said, in the tone of a man noting the opposite, and then, because the sherry was gone and the ground felt briefly level, I asked the other impertinent thing. "Nine years in the post, right? Do you still like it?"

That pause was longer. A full second, and nothing in his face moved at all this time, which is how I knew it was the better question.

"Ask me in December," he said.

"Is that a promise or a policy?"

And somebody's spouse arrived wanting him about parking before he answered, and he inclined his head, precise, unhurried, like a period at the end of a sentence, and moved off into his party, and I stood there by the fireplace with my heart doing a thing I had specifically, in writing, forbidden it to do.

Elena materialized with two plates of the safe fish. "You met him."

"I met him."

"Everyone has a first conversation with Adrian Thorne they remember weirdly well," she said, handing me a plate. "It's a campus phenomenon. We don't discuss it."

Item seven: "we don't discuss it" is doing a lot of work at this college.

* * *

Here's the thing about the vow, so we're clear, so you know I know: it wasn't about him being a man, and it wasn't even mostly about the college's opinion. It's that the last time, I mistook proximity to power for being chosen by it. He signed my conference approvals. He edited my second chapter. He knew what the committee would ask before it asked, and when it started asking about us, he knew that first too, and I found out exactly how far ahead of me he'd been reading the whole time. The word they used about me had four syllables and I heard it through a door.

So: never again with a boss. Not because I can't do it. Because I already did, and it cost me everything.

I walked home the long way around the quad to clear the sherry and my conversation with the Headmaster out of my head. Eleven o'clock. The fog had come up the lawns while everyone was at dinner, waist-high, dead level on top. I put my hand in it, because of course I did, and it was cold as a metal drawer handle in winter and didn't move around my fingers the way vapor moves, and I took my hand back out and decided that was a tomorrow problem.

Corbett House was dark. My third-floor room looked east, across a service lane, at the long gray building, the one with the face in the window on my first afternoon. I'd looked it up on the campus map while ironing: no name, just a hatched outline and a label. CLOSED — ROOF VOID. Structurally unsound, said a facilities notice from four years ago. Scheduled for assessment, said another, from three years ago. There is no third notice.

I unpacked books until midnight because shelving books is the only unpacking that matters, and I was standing at the window with a dead poet's collected letters in one hand when the light went across the third floor of the closed building.

Not a flashlight. Flashlights bounce, scatter, catch the glass. This was a slow, even light, warm-colored, the kind a lamp makes when somebody carries it. It crossed the third floor left to right, steady as a man walking who knows the corridor, went dark at the gap between windows, came on again at the next one. And at the last window it stopped. And went out. Not like a lamp going out. Like a lamp being hooded.

I stood there a full minute with the book in my hand, breathing like I'd taken the stairs.

Structurally unsound. Four years of nobody home.