Besides, Ebele had set this up as a serious conversation, not a casual chat. And Ebele was so much more skilled at pastoral work than Walden that if she thought formal and serious was the way to go, she was probably right.

Still, she should have thought of something like … biscuits. Custard creams on the desk for both of them to snack on. That would have been good.

“Come in, sit down,” she said, while Nikki was still hovering. “Please! Thank you for coming.”

“Hi, Dr Walden,” said Nikki, and nothing else. Well, she was under no obligation to make this easy.

“How’s it all going?” Walden tried. “You’re back in lessons tomorrow, aren’t you? How were the mocks?”

“Okay,” Nikki said. “I mean, I think it was all okay. I felt all right after. You know when you finish an exam, and it feels bad? It didn’t feel that bad.”

“That’s good,” said Walden, well aware—because she’d just checked on the big spreadsheet—that Nikki had flown through all her papers and practicals and was going to see straight A*s when the mock exams were returned next week. “I hope the whole process wasn’t too stressful. The actual A-levels in summer are honestly quite a lot easier, in my opinion.” She said this every year.

“Yeah,” said Nikki, “I mean … yeah, I’ll have more time to revise then.”

She wasn’t going to bring it up, was she. Normally, when your best pupil got an offer from a top university, she told you about it. Just a little bit of bragging was expected, even healthy. But Nikki sounded like nothing good had ever happened to her in her entire life.

Well. When you had an elephant in the room, someone had to be the first person to say Wow, what a big elephant! “Matron tells me you’ve got your Oxford offer,” Walden said. “I wanted to be the first teacher to say congratulations. I’m not surprised, of course. I know how hard you’ve worked for this. I always had complete faith in you. But as well as the normal things, the school is very proud, all of that—I wanted to say that as your Invocation teacher I, personally, am very proud of you. This is an achievement no one can take away from you. It’s well deserved. Well done.”

“Um,” said Nikki. “Thanks.”

The silence stretched. And stretched.

“So—” began Walden, at the same moment as Nikki said, “Um—”

They both stopped. After a moment, Nikki snorted.

Awkward. Embarrassing. Uncool. Lean into it. “I know, I know,” Walden said. “You can probably tell why they mostly only let me talk about demons.”

Dropping the teacher mask worked as nothing else would have. “You’re really good at the demons,” said Nikki reassuringly. “Sorry, Dr Walden. Matron asked you to talk to me, didn’t she?”