She winced. “Sorry…”

“I wasn’t asleep,” Tilly murmured. Gingerly, she reached out, and like it was second nature, rested her palm over Kate’s heartbeat. At the contact, Kate’s body sighed in relief.

“Do you think I’m a lesbian?” Tilly whispered.

Their gazes locked. Worried that Tilly would read her surprise for something else, she looked to the ceiling again. “It’s hard to take that question seriously when your hand is an inch from my nipple…”

“Try harder,” Tilly said evenly.

She could feel Tilly studying her face intently in the dark. “I can’t tell you who you are, Til.” She sighed. “I don’t know who you’ve been attracted to in the past…if you have been attracted to anybody in the past…”

Over the rattle of the venetians in the night breeze, she could hear Tilly thinking. “There was a boy—a man—when I was a missionary. An Islander. He was a medic.” Her hand shifted on Kate’s chest. At the inadvertent tease of Tilly’s nails across the swell of her breast, Kate’s eyes fluttered closed. “I liked him very much. Nothing ever happened but…I thought about him for a long time after I came home,” she confessed. Her hot breath blessed the skin of Kate’s bent arm. “And then in university there was a professor.”

“Oh?”

“Australian Literature,” she murmured. “She was beautiful.”

As she covered Tilly’s fingers lightly, solace fluttered warm in her belly.

“But it’s never been like this,” Tilly whispered. With a tired sigh, she shifted back onto her belly. “Good night.”

Wide awake, Kate blinked at the ceiling, watching on as the blades spun quickly, unrelenting.

As a teacher at St. Joan’s, this was the last thing Kate would ever have to do.

At Lexi’s request, she’d granted an extension and left her exam until, quite literally, the last moment. In just fifty minutes, the passenger ferry would return, ready to collect the last of the girls at Lords Pier, and now, as Kate stepped into the music room and found Lexi waiting at the piano, pale as a spectre, the depth of her melancholy truly hit her.

Lexi looked up. Kate smiled encouragingly and closed the door behind her, spying Grace and Emma watching curiously from the end of the corridor. No doubt they’d have their ears pressed to the music room door in a matter of seconds. The room fell silent but for the faint voices of Sisters Ruth and Tessie down in the quad garden. “Would you like me to close the window?” Kate asked. “Will they distract you?”

Lexi shook her head. “I need the fresh air otherwise I might pass out.”

Kate frowned. It was only her Year Ten exam. And this was Lexi. Nothing bothered Lexi. Kate didn’t know if she should be glad Lexi was taking it so seriously, or worried she was taking it too seriously.

She slung her blazer over the back of a chair and sat down, squinting against the onslaught of the midday sun. Her report book fluttered in the warm breeze. “All packed?” she asked.