He turned to look at her. “Please talk to Ben. Please let him know that I’m close, that when this happens, SJS will be taken care of. You’ll get an academic job, and I’ll take the rest of this money and invest it. I’ll build from there. My mistake until now has been investing in brick-and-mortar stuff, stuff where the roof leaks. Tech is frictionless.”

“We can’t let him keep suffering.”

“We’re almost there. We are.”

“It’s really December first?”

And so Helen exhaled there on the phone with Ben.

“I truly believe it’s going to work out. Let me do the worrying, okay? Concentrate on stuff up there.” She said they would try to come up before Thanksgiving.

I love you. I love you too.

Ahmed had talked about how excited his father was for Parents’ Weekend, and, despite the buzz cut, he wanted his father to see the school. But then that Wednesday Ahmed got the news that there had been a collapse in negotiations that required his father at a last-minute session in London. He had said he would try to fly in for the Sunday afternoon. Ahmed stopped tidying their room.

“Maybe others with parents not here could come to dinner with us,” Ahmed said after they had both brushed their teeth.

“I’m going out with Hutch and Evan’s parents,” said Ben. He hadn’t yet asked Hutch and Evan what they were doing. Ben managed to end up at dinner with the two of them most days after his soccer and their football practice, and a few nights a week they studied together in the library, but he had had to make up an excuse to get out of another trip to town with them. Two separate times Ben had seen Hutch and a few other guys heading into the woods, maybe to drink, maybe to smoke pot, maybe just to be somewhere faculty couldn’t see.

“Okay. I will see who else there is. Or go to Boston.”

Ben tried to hear whether Ahmed was angling for an invitation to his nonexistent dinner. But Ahmed just took his butter-yellow shirt from where it lay across the back of his desk chair and inserted the wide wooden hanger first into one shoulder, then the other, and hung it up in the closet exactly the way he did every night.

Then one morning the campus was full of unfamiliar adults. Many parents thought the grounds didn’t look as lush as in years past. The chapel lawn—such a long expanse of grass that it seemed to be a portrait of the school’s soul—had several prominent yellow patches. The black paint on a few of the streetlamps along Middle School Pond was flaking.