“I admit it, Eleanor. But I ask you this—would you be here now, alive and healthy and thriving in your art and your work and your life if I hadn’t done what I did? You tell me. For my own part, I look back on what I did when you were a teenager with genuine shame. But I also can’t think of anything else that would have worked with you. You were hardly a typical teenager. You didn’t want money and you didn’t want exotic vacations or gold stickers on your report card. You wanted me. Nothing and no one else. Only someone evil and cruel would put a choke collar on a poodle puppy but on an untrained Rottweiler? Simply good sense.”

“I did growl at you all the time, didn’t I?”

“All the time.”

“There is one little difference though,” Nora said. “As evil as the means were…you enjoyed it. You got off on it. You weren’t putting a choke collar on a Rottweiler because you were afraid of getting bitten. You were putting it on because it turned you on. Yeah, your method worked, but don’t get all Father Flanagan with me, Søren. You loved what you did to me. The jokes about tying me up with rope to make me behave, making me water the stick every day for six months, withholding answers to my questions until I jumped through all your hoops, whistling at me like I was a dog you had to make come to heel. It made you hard. You didn’t just do it for me. You did it for you, because you liked it.”

“No,” Søren said. “I didn’t like it. I loved it. Hence the shame. At the time, I didn’t see any other way to help you, none that would work. Certainly, no other way that you would willingly go along with. You weren’t the sort of teenager who’d respond well to Outward Bound, were you?”

She almost laughed. He almost had her there. But she didn’t laugh and he didn’t either.

“You didn’t see any other way to help me,” Nora said. “But did you really look?”

He glanced away, not meeting her eyes. “I didn’t look. I was afraid I’d find another way, one that meant walking away from you.” He stood and turned. She saw him staring out the window onto the street, one hand on the windowsill, the picture of deepest contemplation.

“I wanted to be like Father Henry to you, the way he was to me. I wanted to be the kindly caring father figure you were missing in your life,” he said. “But I was more like Father Murran than Father Henry. Father Henry’s love for his students was pure. I can’t say that about my feelings for you. I wish I could.”

“I wish I could, too.”

“Let me ask you this.” He turned from the window, faced her. “Now, twenty-three years after we met—what would you go back and change? Here. This is my key to the TARDIS. Take it.”