Roz told them: your magical education can make you interesting, funny, successful, and visibly wealthy. Walden saw the students near the front noticing her pristine trainers. She talked about the work. Her vivid delight in pure magic had not faded, and it gave Walden a little pang, remembering. And she spoke eloquently about being a professional magician as an immigrant, as a person from a poor family, as an out and proud lesbian. Really, she had ‘role model’ written all over her.

Walden was genuinely very glad she’d managed to get hold of Roz for this. A real person, an actual adult with an actual job, could be orders of magnitude more inspiring than any commonplace teacher. She stood at the front and scanned the crowd for misbehaviour, but she only had to hold the gaze of a couple of whispering girls, and once walk over to a bored Year Twelve and stand pointedly next to him for a few moments. Eventually, he stopped fidgeting with the phone he should not have had in his pocket.

A storm of applause at the end, and—wonder of wonders—when Roz asked Any questions? some children actually put their hands up. The Head of Careers ran interference and rephrased some of the more incoherent questions, and Walden listened with satisfaction. In the middle of the crowd she picked out Nikki and Aneeta, sitting together, plainly attentive. Nikki was leaning forward slightly in her seat. Walden tried to think hard in her direction: Here is someone you could be. Come on. Think it through. Don’t throw away your chance.

“Wow,” said Roz in the pub afterwards. “That was scary!”

“You were brilliant,” Walden assured her. “Really, I mean it, you were inspiring.”

“I can’t believe you do that every day.”

“Not usually with a group that size. You were fantastic, I mean it.”

Roz was applying herself with goodwill to the Red Lion’s only vegetarian offering, an entire roasted cauliflower. The goodwill was probably not deserved. She glanced up at the compliment—had Walden been too effusive? Did she sound like she didn’t mean it?

“You’re overthinking,” Roz said, knowing.

Walden had to laugh. “Of course. Whoops. I suppose I haven’t changed that much.”

“Mmm,” said Roz. “I feel like I should say sorry, you know. For how we left things.”

“Oh, come on,” said Saffy, deeply embarrassed, “I was the one who—”

“—dumped me by text from the airport?”

Saffy said, “Er.”

When you put it like that, it did sound bad.

Roz laughed at her expression. “Hey, come on, I was there. I know why you were too scared to do it face-to-face. Lucy calls me her steamroller.”