Mock exam season sent the school into a hive of buzzing study sessions and busy library visits, and it wasn’t just cramming that had everyone humming and focused. The Presentation of the Pillars was approaching, and soon Rosewood would come to life with the memories of its namesakes, which would have been exciting, except for the fact Lottie still had nothing to contribute.

With Binah’s advice still nestled in her head, Lottie put all her other worries to the side, and set out to finally face what she’d spent so long trying to ignore. It was time to confront herself.

Lottie settled in Room A-2 while Samuel stationed himself outside the door. It was a cosy little room on the top floor of the art department, the very same place she’d first learned of Liliana over a year ago. The white shutters rattled in the cold breeze, the crawling ivy from the outside wall peeping in, curious to see what she was up to. Taking a deep breath, she extracted Jamie’s ring from her pocket and put it on her finger, then, as if she were ornamenting herself before a coronation, she placed her family tiara on her head and began.

She was surrounded by art materials, paints, pastels, brushes and an array of canvases. It felt like years since she’d really painted anything this personal, and the thought made her fingers twitch in anticipation, like being reunited with an old friend. Away from the messy art supplies, spread on the tables around her were all the books she could find on Liliana and her alter ego William Tufty. Exactly forty-four books lay open, like a flurry of seagulls in flight, and, out of all the books, only three of them mentioned Liliana, and, out of those, there was only one painting of her. It was the image she’d already seen: Lili – her tiara atop a cascade of tangled curls, a fierce look in her eyes, as she held a sword before her. The very sword Lottie had hidden under her bed now. Only Lottie and her friends knew that this was not the last image of her to survive, that her study was filled with self-portraits and adoring renderings of the people she loved.

It was all there, hidden in William Tufty’s rhyme, ‘The Vixen and the Delicate Mouse’. Little did anyone know that they were both the same person: Liliana was the vixen and Tufty the mouse. Two sides of one coin.