“Yes, well . . . what are you doing with your life? Today, I mean. It’s a Saturday. Day of leisure. Go . . . be leisurely.” Susan backed hurriedly out the door. “Right now, in fact. You’ll have a great time. Send me a postcard. Bye. Love you. Take a packed lunch.”

Slamming the door shut, Susan collapsed back against the wall and stared down at her phone in abject terror.

Esther was restless. She’d been sitting at her desk for more than an hour, and she’d barely managed a chapter of The Moonstone. Or rather, the York Notes on The Moonstone. They couldn’t possibly expect her to actually read all these books. That’d take forever.

Maybe if she’d still been with The Boy, she could have wasted time sending him sexy messages—or, wasn’t it the weekend? Not bothering with lectures meant that it was hard to tell what day it was sometimes. Esther checked her phone.

Yes. It was the weekend. Which meant he could have caught the train down from Tackleford for a little sexy realtime—

Only he wouldn’t have, would he? That had been the problem.

There were no traces of him in her room. The same day that they’d broken up, someone had put up a poster in the stairwell advertising a swap shop, and Esther had gone there to trade a laundry basket’s worth of memories for a set of six different-sized scissors, a secondhand collection of York Notes, and a funky notebook that said, You’re weird. I like it.

No regrets. The notebook was cool, the scissors sharp, and, well, she’d just read half a chapter about The Moonstone.

Emotional baggage, on the other hand, wasn’t so easily swapped, and Esther had decided to drop hers on the floor and run as far away from it as she could.

Maybe if she hadn’t run quite so far, quite so fast, then she could have tried giving one of her friends from home a call to catch up, but she’d left it too long now.

A message from Daisy or Susan, even from Ed Gemmell, got answered within the hour, but the last message from Sarah Grote, her best friend back home, had come in six days ago. It was the sort of heartfelt, kind message that demanded a more meaningful reply than a silly selfie or a blithely chirpy emoji.

So she hadn’t sent any reply at all.