The caffeine hits hard and for the first time in a few hours normality sets in. She remembers now that her wave modelling coursework is due and she’s nowhere near finishing it so she takes her mug over to the table and reaches for her laptop to tap out a quick email to Mark Ratner requesting a deadline extension and is startled to see an email from the Dean.

Nevis, in view of recent events, it may be a good idea for you to come in and discuss your academic progress. Would 4 p.m. today be convenient?

She types out a reply, her fingers trembling on the keyboard. The Dean! She’s been to his lectures, of course, and sat in seminars with him, once even had a face-to-face tutorial and nearly died of fright. He told her she was talented, which made her heart burst from its box, and he’d be watching out for her but he had never taken any more interest in her after that. Whenever she had seen him, either at lectures or, more usually, rushing along the corridors in the mathematics building or in the Deanery, she’d tried to catch his eye in the hope that he would remember his undertaking but he never so much as glanced her way. The prospect of being together with him in a room in her current weird, disconnected state to discuss something other than mathematics is so daunting it makes her throat hurt. But she can hardly say no and so she replies and presses ‘send’ and the email whooshes off and she sits in the stillness of the room for a moment, conscious that her life has already changed in ways that she may not ever come back from. Maybe that’s what the feeling is about. It’s not the flat that has changed but something inside her that has subtly and irrevocably altered, in the same way it did back in the summer, when she found the letter. Perhaps life consists of such moments, she thinks, until a person is so changed that she no longer recognises herself. Perhaps that’s what happened to Satnam.

She turns on her phone. There is a text from Honor that feels surprisingly welcome.

How are you?