He went on to talk about the yew in art, as a symbol—Carmen didn’t understand everything, but he made so much clear, speaking about its use in archery, about the myth that Pontius Pilate was born under one, about how they were the most common tree found in churchyards and that in fact people would have gathered there to celebrate druidic ceremonies. Churches were built on the site of yews, not the other way around. She thought of Bronagh and smiled. She would like this. Then she realized, glancing around, that Bronagh was there. The woman waved heartily across the crowded room, and Carmen couldn’t help smiling a little.

“Could you make a dendrogram?” someone was asking from the back.

“Well, that’s a little reductive,” said Oke, still smiling. “There’s no need for an indicative diagram when the yew itself can show us in real time everything she needs to tell us . . .”

And he clicked onto a very confusing slide that Carmen didn’t have the faintest hope of understanding.

But it was his clear desire to explain, to let the light in to what he was doing, that was striking; he took the students seriously and explained patiently.

Mr. McCredie was watching her carefully, wondering if she’d spotted it. That Blair—dazzling, silly Blair—was a child, and that Oke, who dressed like a teenager, was in fact a man. He did not speak much, Mr. McCredie, but he didn’t miss much either, and he had grown very fond of his charge, as he rather thought of her. He didn’t want her head turned by nonsense, and he thought a lot of the serious, clever Oke.

Carmen had a miserable certainty that she had missed her chance. Blair, for all his fine clothes and his petulant selfishness, was a child. Was absolutely a child, sitting there, performing platitudes for adoring people listening to him, laughing at his lack of belief in them, reveling in his own cynicism.

Whereas this—whatever a dendrogram was—this was real. This existed in the world; this was tough, difficult work to understand. She had been topsy-turvy this entire time. She had let herself get completely carried away by Blair’s superficial glitter, even as she’d told herself she hadn’t.

She thought again of Oke’s hands closing over her eyes in the mirror maze and the jump for breath, the sudden rippling excitement.

The lecture had finished, she noticed, while she had been lost in another world, still staring at him, as the disgruntled woman to her right was trying to get past her.

“Excuse me?” she said quite abruptly, and Carmen stood, amazed at herself, but ready to go and find Oke, find him and tell him that . . . well, that it had taken him talking about some stupid yew tree to make her realize she really liked him. And nobody else.