Before the dam could burst, Daisy stood up purposefully, tucking her mail into her backpack along with the things she’d need for her morning lecture. She made a great fuss of zipping it back up, tightening the straps, and striding toward the canteen, as if she could outpace the sadness at her back, whose arms were slipping around her, squeezing her chest in an unwelcome embrace.

Just as she reached the entrance to the dining hall, her phone buzzed.

“Granny!”

“Hello, my darling. Sorry I missed your call. Been wiring a new socket into the living room. Had half the floorboards up last night and found next-door’s cat down there this morning . . .”

Daisy’s lip trembled at the thought of things changing without her. Sure, it was just a new socket, but then what? Finding a better home for the vacuum cleaner? Painting the front door?

“. . . had to drag him out by the tail. Don’t think Nancy’s going to be too pleased at the state of him, but if she brings it up, I’ll tell her it was either that or bury the stupid thing alive. They did that, didn’t they? Put dead cats in the walls? You’d know all about this sort of thing from your course . . .”

But Daisy was lost in a nightmare vision of returning home to find everything in the house ever so slightly different from when she’d left. Door handles turning the other way. Hot taps that now ran cold. Armchairs moved six inches to the left, so that they no longer aligned with the television . . .

“Daisy?”

“Don’t replace the microwave!” Daisy squawked in response.

There was silence on the other end of the phone before her granny started up in a gentle tone, “Is everything all right, petal? You don’t sound quite yourself.”

Daisy opened her mouth, ready to tell her grandmother how lonely she felt sometimes, how homesick . . . But then she stopped. This was her problem; sharing it would make it Granny’s problem, too, and she already had enough of those. Daisy might feel lonely, but Granny really was alone, and what was she doing? Was she moping around the place feeling sorry for herself? No. She was out there wiring in electric sockets and relocating the vacuum cleaner and (possibly) painting the front door.

“I’m fine, Granny.” To distract herself, Daisy walked over to the bulletin board outside the dining hall, concentrating very hard on keeping her eyes wide open. “I just called because the National Geographic arrived, and I wanted . . .” What she wanted was to be able to share it with Granny. “I wanted to call and thank you for sending it.”

As Granny chatted happily on the other end of the line, Daisy felt tears brimming behind her eyes, and she swallowed, glaring furiously at the poster in front of her nose.