“Technically I still have a job,” Walden said. “I think, reading between the lines,” that had been a difficult phone call, “that it would make David’s life much, much easier if I gracefully resigned. I can’t do my job. At least, not for the time being. And also … I don’t want to.” It was the first time she’d said it. She said it again to make sure, and heard the steady ring of truth. “I don’t want to go back.”

“Good,” said Laura. “Good.”

“Oh?”

“Not that it’s my business,” Laura said. “I know. But it’s about time.”

“Technically I left school in 2003,” Saffy said. “Realistically—”

“—no, you didn’t.”

“No,” said Saffy. “No, I don’t think I ever left Chetwood at all. When I was seventeen I watched my first love get consumed by a monster, and I knew that it was my fault. And then instead of getting therapy about it, I went and got a doctorate about it. So that explains,” she made a vague hand gesture, “most things about me, I suppose.”

“Give me some credit for being an adult, it was twenty years ago!” said Laura, and after a moment Saffy realised it was her own words being quoted back at her. But Laura didn’t seem to mean it unkindly. Saffy couldn’t remember the last time she had felt—or wanted to feel—understood, by another human being. It was a funny feeling. A little disorienting, when you had spent so much of your life trying to avoid ever getting too personal.

“Well,” she said, trying to make light of it, “after all, most grown-ups have baggage—don’t we?”

“No, I’ve spent my career trying to make up the Marshals’ failure to a sad little girl I glimpsed once when I was twenty-two for normal reasons,” Laura said. “Probably it’s all my mum’s fault, or something.”

“The good news is that Nikki Conway is going to Oxford,” Saffy said. “Where she’s going to become an absolutely first-rate magician, if I’m any judge. Which I am.”

Laura made a face. “The passage of time. It shouldn’t be allowed.”

“But it happens whether you like it or not,” Saffy said. Laura made a toasting gesture at her, and she answered—left-handed, without too much difficulty—by miming a clinking glass. Another thing that was terrible about being alone with your thoughts in a warded hospital bed: no one would bring you a comforting gin and tonic, no matter how medicinal you felt it would be.

“I don’t suppose you could tell me what happened to the Phoenix,” Saffy said.