“There’s no point. She’s only here for a year. She’ll leave, and then I’ll have given Grace up. The whole year with her, it’s... How can I explain it to her when I don’t understand it myself?”
“Who says she’ll only stay a year?” asks Maeve, and I resist the urge to shut my eyes in despair.
“Emma says so, and she means it. She’s here to find out more about her dad. Her parents met at Dunbridge, and she has no contact with him.” I pause. These are Emma’s secrets. Things she told me in confidence, and only me. But I promised to do whatever I could to help her in her search. So I have to get Maeveinvolved. “His name is Jacob Wiley. He’s a musician, and he was born in Scotland.” I tell her everything I’ve found about him on the internet. “Do you know if Mum or Dad ever mentioned him? They must have been only a couple of years apart.”
“Hmm, I see.” Maeve rests her index finger against the tip of her nose, the way she always does when she’s thinking. “No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him, sorry.”
“No worries. It was a long shot.”
“If he was at school here, there’s bound to be someone who knew him.”
“Mr.Ward did. He’s made a few remarks.”
“Oh, God, he’s probably the only teacher I don’t miss.”
“He’s getting worse,” I say. I glance around unobtrusively. Luckily, there’s no one nearby who could have heard us.
“I think it annoys him to this day that I got an A star for A level,” Maeve muses cheerily.
“I bet it does. I really don’t know why he went into teaching. It really doesn’t seem like he wants anyone to learn anything.”
“You’ll make a way better teacher.”
I have to smile. “I hope so.”
“Have you started thinking about universities yet?”
I nod slowly. “Yeah, but I don’t have to decide anything for certain just now.”
“True. Well, you’ve got plenty of time. Does Grace have any plans for where she wants to go?”
“Oxford.”
“I see,” Maeve says, and I’m sure she knows what that means. She doesn’t bother with pointless clichés. That long-distancerelationships and weekend visits can work out, can keep it going. It didn’t work for her and Eliza, and they were only an hour and a half apart, in St. Andrews and Edinburgh. So why would it work out for me and Grace if there were four hundred miles or so between our universities?
“When did you know you were going to have to split up?” I ask the question as if it were about no more than the weather. How can I sound so casual?
“I didn’t want to face up to it for ages,” she says. “But really, I knew back when we started applying to universities. We spent the whole of the upper sixth pretending that everything wasn’t about to change between us.” Maeve doesn’t look at me as she continues. “I sometimes wish we’d ended it before we left school. It might have been easier to settle in at St. Andrews if I hadn’t spent the whole time wondering how we could patch things up.”
I sigh. “Sometimes I wonder how Theo and Harriett manage.”
“That’s Theo for you,” Maeve says. “He says hi, by the way. He’s still pretty much living in the library even though it’s still the vacation. He’s decided to revise last year’s work before next semester.”
“That’s Theo for you,” I repeat.
“He’s wondering if he can take a semester out next spring and do some volunteering with Mum and Dad on their project.”
“Oh. Seriously?”
Maeve just nods.
“When’s your flight?” I ask.
“Next week. I’ll be back just before term starts again.”
“Then I guess we won’t see each other before that?”
Maeve shakes her head with a smile. “But that’s why we’re seeing each other now.”
