The conference was next week and Roz was probably booked solid already, but Walden considered Roz—glamorous, international, successful, and exquisitely magical Roz—and knew that she had to make an attempt. She sent a message back: she really couldn’t get away from school in term time, but perhaps Roz would like to visit Chetwood and give a careers talk to the—she racked her brains for the American phrasing—juniors and seniors? And Walden could show her around, take her to the pub, have a nice catch-up … what did Roz think?

Almost instant reply, though it had to be the middle of the night in California: Roz would love to, and here was her schedule.

Walden was rather smug as she emailed the Careers Department about her coup. Among other things, a visiting speaker was an excellent use of the graveyard slot on Saturday afternoons.

“It is so cold,” said Roz when Walden met her at the train station. She was huddled in a fleece-lined coat and her American accent sang out bright and sweet and weirdly loud in the echoing hollows of Victorian brickwork. “No one told me it would be this cold!”

“We’re further north than Vancouver,” said Walden, which was one of those transatlantic fun facts you just picked up somewhere. “We don’t get that much snow, though. Coastal climate.”

“I know about coastal climates, Saffy,” said Roz. “You look fantastic, look at you!”

Walden was fairly sure she didn’t look all that fantastic, especially not next to Roz’s beautiful golden silk scarf and perfect razorblade-straight bobbed hair, but she submitted to air kisses—when had Roz become the kind of person who did air kisses?—and escorted her guest to Chetwood village’s single waiting taxi.

From there the afternoon turned into a weird balancing act, professional Dr Walden on her home ground versus the Saffy of old. Roz belonged to a very different part of Walden’s life—the furthest from home she had ever been, a time when she’d lived and breathed pure magic nearly every waking moment, and when she had managed to pass herself off as a glamorous foreigner. Looking back, that had said more about the power of an English accent than any actual glamour on the part of early-twenties Saffy. But that was the version of her Roz knew; and she was aware of sidelong assessing glances, of how different Dr Walden the schoolteacher must seem to the person she’d been before.

And oh, California: graduate magical research, funding, genuine working relationships with people whose work Saffy had cited over and over as an undergrad and during her MThau. Hazy golden light over the Pacific, the total social freedom of the outsider, and magic, magic, magic. Roz had been the crowning glory of those years: beautiful, brilliant, challenging, all that intellect and ambition—an equal, as no one since Charlie had really felt like an equal.