Probably there was something seriously wrong with Mark, but Walden’s arrangement with him wasn’t an emotional entanglement. She didn’t have to care. She saw Roz off at the train station the next morning, and took a moment on her walk back up to school to look up the approximate value of a century-old rowhouse on a hill in San Francisco. She thought it was very probable that this was exactly what Roz had intended her to do. Surely she hadn’t been this interested in money when they were grad students?

To be fair, neither of them had really had any back then.

The house was worth an eye-watering amount. And when Walden got back to school, she was waylaid on her way to the staffroom by the Bursar, looking gleeful. Chetwood had just received a donation of twenty thousand US dollars, earmarked for the looming repair of the chapel roof. “Even after the exchange rate takes a bite out of it,” he said, “that’s not small change. Please thank your friend for us. Invite her again. Do you think we could get her at the Governors’ annual dinner? The alumni ball?”

Walden escaped from him, went into her office, and wrote an appropriately delighted and grateful Facebook message, a personal accompaniment to the equally delighted and grateful email Roz was going to get from the Headmaster. She had an obscure sense of having lost this round. The donation felt like a jab, like the last word in an argument Walden hadn’t meant to start.

While she sat at her laptop and stared into space, something Mark had said drifted into her thoughts. Most people with principles are hypocrites on some level: a very comforting bit of cynicism. And because she was thinking of Mark, a comparison occurred to her, not Mark versus Laura but Mark versus Roz. Walden’s own historical taste in these things … something about ambition, about selfishness, about power … even Charlie, come to think of it …

All of which made Laura Kenning, who had genuinely sacrificed the direction of her career for her principles, into an outlier. So it really would never have worked. Walden didn’t know why she still thought about Laura at all.

chapter twenty-six GUIDANCE

Walden’s office was not set up for pastoral chats. It was her workspace first and foremost. She’d almost stopped noticing how it looked. The panelled walls, the imposing desk topped with green leather, the antique clock; the dusty overloaded bookshelves, the ugly row of filing cabinets jammed in a corner; even the awkwardly retrofitted Ikea computer desk opposite, where some poor electrician had had to figure out how to wire this room without doing too much damage to the wainscotting—to Walden, this was just where she worked. Where she lived, effectively, when she wasn’t in the labs or the staffroom.