“They didn’t check attendance, if that’s what you mean.”

“Right.” Esther returned the book to its original position. “But . . . I should probably read this, then?”

“Probably,” Ed Gemmell admitted, then cleared his throat. “You could study it with me now if you’d like?”

But Esther had returned to doodling on her hands. “No thanks. I’m someone who works best under pressure. No prep until five minutes before I have to prove I’ve done any.”

Esther hopped off the window seat on which she had been lounging to drift around the stacks, idly picking out titles and taking selfies in the same pose as the author in the photo before putting the best on Instagram and sending the rest to Daisy and Susan with the message: A Study in Being Studious.

She didn’t like to admit it, but Esther was lonely. She had friends—good ones—but she also had a lot of free time. Back home, for all she’d bathed in the melancholy of being misunderstood, she’d also been busy. The Tackleford Academy timetable hadn’t allowed for much wallowing. Attending lessons was mandatory, and everyone’s extracurricular time followed the same schedule. There had been little opportunity for the free time that she’d craved like a drug so she could be alone with The Boy. (Once she’d secured him. High school romances seemed to move at a glacial pace.)

Now that she had oodles of alone time and the privacy of her own room in which to spend it, Esther no longer saw the appeal.

Not when she no longer had someone to share it with.

Everyone back home had told her how hard a long-distance relationship would be to maintain, but her stubborn, can-do attitude had inured her to reason.

Eleven days she and The Boy had lasted, and it had been Esther who’d pulled out. Or, technically, she’d pulled a shady character called Steve Shields in a dingy nightclub and ended up in his bed. Whatever. The result was the same.

Since then, she’d been free to explore the alien landscape of university as a free agent, unfettered by her ties to Tackleford. And yet, university wasn’t proving quite how she’d imagined it. There had to be more to this alien landscape than lectures and libraries and laundry (not that she’d done much of any of those things). University was unchartered territory, and already it felt as if she’d mapped out the essentials without making any exciting new discoveries. Where were the lofty intellectuals who stayed up all night drinking three-hundred-year-old wine and debating posh cheese? Or the secret societies that guaranteed you a job in an FTSE 100 company just because you’d once jumped off the roof of a lecture hall?

Drifting back to where Ed Gemmell remained hunched over his book, Esther slumped down next to him.