“It’s Noah.”

I roll my eyes at Gary. “Sure. Blame your man-baby boyfriend.”

She covers her face with her hands, then whispers, through her fingers, something I can barely hear. I make her repeat it. “Frontotemporal degeneration. Early onset dementia.” Gary and I look at each other in horror, then grab each other by the elbow again.

She tells us that it started about a year ago, that she thought then that she could cover for him, protect him. She thought the symptoms would be mild enough to manage, and at first they were—forgetfulness, saying the wrong word or not being able to think of the right word, the childishness—the effusiveness, the messy eating. But then it got worse. “That’s when the pooping started. I kept waiting for the right moment to tell the board, but I wanted to spare him the indignity of having his career end this way.”

“But making someone else look guilty was fine.” Gary tugs on my arm. Judy. I ignore him and pull away. “It’s an incredibly sad situation but you tried to make it look like it was Teddy, an innocent teenager who’s been living in fear of being falsely accused of this! That’s unforgivable!” Another tug on my sleeve. Judy. “I’m sorry he’s ill, Grace, but you can’t go around casting suspicion on kids, on good boys who have been made to feel like criminals. I hope Teddy isn’t scarred for life. I hope you haven’t caused him to develop an anxiety disorder from all this stress!” Another tug, then finally Gary holds up his phone. It’s Teddy:

Aren’t you guys coming?

* * *

With Charlotte back in the sling, we leave Grace in the hallway and race into the multipurpose room, where Teddy’s class is just now approaching the makeshift stage. Gary and I stand against a wall, behind rows of folding chairs and yoga mats and tumbling pads. We watch as the small group of gangly awkward teenagers, dressed as sheep, all follow a shepherd—played by several People Puppets under a big fat man’s suit with devil horns over an orange wig. The sheep stop following the devil-shepherd the minute they pass a sign that suddenly appears on a People Puppet signpost:

THIS WAY TO LOVE.

Parents clap, whistle, and cheer as the sheep break out of their slow-crawl toward hate and reverse course, joining together in a joyous embrace of unity and acceptance—this is, after all, Morningside Montessori, and it wouldn’t be Spotlight without Mr. Noah turning up the music and coming out to join the teens in dance to mark the end of Inhabitancy. Gary and I exchange glances—knowing what we now do about him, we can’t help but feel gutted at his childlike ebullience, his blissful ignorance, the last dance of his career as head of school. The whole world is ending tonight, and we are helpless to change it.

It’s then that the sheep clear out and the lights go down. When they go back on again, slowly, and dimly, there are only two People Puppets—Nick and Phoebe—for the finale they promised. They’re presenting as two sheeted figures: a woman and a dog. The Puppet-Woman is sitting on the floor, crying, holding her heart as she waves goodbye and blows farewell kisses to invisible people, bereft until she looks down at the Puppet-Dog, who crawls over to her and puts its head in her lap. And then, through the magic of yards and yards of fabric and some kind of pulley system, the smaller Puppet-Dog—Phoebe—is hoisted up into a sling that the Puppet-Woman slips over her head and around her neck. Suddenly, the big sad papier-mâché face is gone, replaced by a giant papier-mâché happy face. A sense of beatific bliss, created through warm yellow lighting, bathes the stage: the once-sad Puppet-Woman is now wearing a Puppet-Dog, and she is saved.