The ancient television set thrums in the corner, and in front of me is a chipped coffee table with a big spread of dog-eared magazines promising crash diets and inside scoops on royal babies. The only other people here are a mother and son - the kid’s playing on his mother’s phone while she flips through People. I rub my sweating palms on my jeans. I hope Dr Jamil won’t have a problem with refilling my prescription. From the way she spoke to me when she filled it, I think she meant for the Klonopin to last me a couple of months, not a few weeks. I know it’s not great. I know I should slow down. But it feels so easy, so instant, when the anti-anxiety meds kick in and take over. Besides, I think, if Dr Jamil knew the full extent of what I’m carrying, she’d understand. Hell, she’d probably skip the benzos and go straight to a tranquilizer.

I glance out the window to the steady October drizzle. The bonnet of Jan’s car is already slick with rain. Hopefully she’s left an umbrella inside it. At Horton right now, the horse chestnut trees will be full to bursting, ready to drop. The girls will be changing out their early-Fall blazers for their winter coats. Those redbrick buildings will be growing dull in the winter light.

I hadn’t been teaching there long - just a year. It hadn’t been part of my plan to come back to the U.S. but Jan had been having a bout of poor health and deep down I was thinking maybe Mom and I could start to heal those old rifts if I finally came home. I was homesick I guess. I’d left Connecticut at eighteen and never looked back. Stanford, and then England, then Singapore, Holland, Hong Kong. I’d been teaching on the International School circuit, fulfilling my teenage promise to myself and Jan to get out and never come back. After everything that happened with Fiona, all I wanted was to be as far away as possible, somewhere where nobody knew me, and nobody could point fingers or make suggestions about my past. And then the opening came up at Horton. I saw it posted online. Girls’ second-level academy in Northern Connecticut. It was strange seeing it posted there in black and white, that familiar name. It was even stranger that I applied, considering how things turned out the first time: I’d been at Horton before. My first time, I was sixteen years old. Fiona and I were regional scholarship students, coached to within an inch of our sanity by Fiona’s mother, Jan, who taught at our local high school and had got wind of the scholarship incentive.