Walden graciously pretended that she had very urgent non-teenager things to do while Aneeta hugged first Nikki, then Mathias, then Will, then Nikki again, and the four of them all talked at once about their ordeal. Laura followed her lead and helped Walden retrieve clean towels and bedsheets for the guest rooms. “How are they still this loud?” she muttered.

“‘O adolescence, adolescence, I wince before thine incandescence!’” Walden quoted, and at Laura’s blank look, said, “It’s a poem. I think about it a lot.”

The flat was sized for a small family, and Walden by herself rattled around in it a bit. Getting the two spare bedrooms ready took long enough that by the time she returned to the living room, the sixth formers seemed to have calmed down a bit. They were all still talking at once. “—can’t believe you were that stupid,” Nikki was saying to Will.

“I thought you were going to die, Conway!” Will protested. “And I haven’t even asked you to Leavers yet so like—”

Nikki’s mouth dropped open. “You’re asking me to Leavers?”

In the pause that followed, Aneeta said in a loud, entertained whisper, “Oh my God it’s happening.”

Mathias sniggered. Will had turned violently pink.

Walden swallowed a laugh. Teenagers. You knew them so well and yet in some ways, of course, you didn’t know them at all. She’d parsed Will’s dash into the incursion as idiocy, not adolescent knight-errantry—but, after all, the two were not mutually exclusive. She knew very well how easy it was to be seventeen, in love, and an idiot. Oh Charlie, she thought. Oh sweetheart. You were so young.

“Ahem,” she said, and all four of them looked up. “It’s well past your bedtime, children.” You couldn’t call Year Nine ‘children’ without offending them, but by the time they hit Upper Sixth they always found it funny again. Walden couldn’t resist adding, though it was a little cruel, “Sort out your interpersonal issues in the morning.”

Various mortified looks as all four of them realised belatedly how loudly they’d been talking. Walden smiled to herself. What was the good of being the grown-up if you didn’t get to embarrass them a little? She sent them off to the guest rooms. She fetched them glasses of water, and old T-shirts for the girls to sleep in; the boys were going to have to make do in their day clothes, because Walden had nothing that would fit. She left Nikki and Aneeta cuddling up together in the double bed in the smaller guest room, and Will and Mathias doing rock-paper-scissors for who got the bed and who got the futon in the bigger one. She went back into the kitchen.

Laura was there.