Mr Laird pours carefully, the old kettle wheezing on the sideboard. The windows are steamed; outside, the last of the autumn sun cuts through the courtyard and into the study. Rain whispers against the walls; the radiators knock, stubborn and hollow. The staffroom smells of dust, instant coffee, and the faint chemical bite of floor polish. There are Rich Tea biscuits in a tin, stale at the edges. A cork board curls with last term’s notices. Nothing in the room wants to admit to change.

Mr Halvorsen sits behind his ‘headmaster’ plaque like it might shield him, and Father Doyle steeples his hands as though prayer might turn into policy. Madame Perrin keeps pushing her glasses up her nose - a habitual, nervous habit.

On the agenda — though no one names it — is Hannah’s absence.

“She has been removed to her mother’s care,” Mr Halvorsen says, in the voice of a man who hopes the first sentence will be enough to end the discussion. “The official line is disciplinary. Trespassing. After hours.”

No one speaks for a moment. The radiator groans.

Laird clears his throat. “Erik — with all due respect, the students don’t believe it. Rumours are spreading.”

“Rumours are inevitable in a school like this, Bernard,” he replies. “We cannot prevent gossip, only direct it. The word expelled is firm enough. They will tire of speculation.”

Father Doyle folds his hands. “There will be grief. Even without death, there will be grief. Young people sense absence in ways older people prefer not to.”

“Then remind them of the importance of prayer,” Mr Halvorsen says, curt. “Adele, I trust you have arranged sufficient support for our more…fragile students.”

Madame Perrin nods.

Laird watches the exchange in silence. He remembers Julian looking at the floor. He remembers Emily’s refusal to take even an hour off. Children trying on adult silences. Then he remembers the way Marla Holloway had asked for tea with two sugars, straight-faced, as if that were the appropriate response to not dead. He doesn’t want to say she’s changed. That’s the kind of cliché reserved for when students come back from summer holidays taller or with pink hair or pierced noses. Marla still wears the same careful plait she’s worn since Year 7. But something’s shifted.

And maybe it was always coming.

He remembers when she was fourteen. Wrote a full sonnet cycle in response to The Waste Land, annotated in pink and purple biro. He remembers thinking, this one’s different. Not clever in the way clever students are. Like she’d arrived having already read everything and was simply humouring them by doing it again.

“They will ask questions,” Laird says at last. His own voice surprises him — low, careful. “They will ask where she is now. What should we tell them?”

“Expelled,” Halvorsen repeats. “That is enough.”

“But if the police—”

“There is no police matter,” he interrupts sharply. His eyes flick to the window, then back to the table. “We do not use the word accident. We use disciplinary. Do you understand?”

The words hang heavy. Madame Perrin coughs into her sleeve. Father Doyle makes the sign of the cross as if to settle something invisible. Laird feels a prickle at the back of his neck — the way truth warps when spoken around.

And he remembers.

He remembers the spring of 1989, when he himself sat where the students sit now. A boy in the year above him — Matt, or was it Mike? — vanished between prep and dinner. Whispers of the chapel, of the cloisters after lights. Two days later the staff told them he had been expelled. The word landed with the same firmness then as now, as if it alone could paper over the absence.

But Bernard remembers his guitar, left behind in the music room. He remembers seeing his shoes under the radiator in the cloakroom the morning after she was gone. Expelled students take their things with them. That was the thought that lodged like grit. No one said it aloud. They learned not to.

He wonders if Halvorsen remembers that case too, or if headmasters are trained to forget as a condition of the job.

Halvorsen closes the folder before him with deliberate care, as if the sound of paper shutting might serve as a conclusion. “We will say nothing further. We will keep the story straight. We owe the school continuity.”

The meeting ends not with a prayer but with the shriek of chairs across linoleum. The kettle rattles as someone nudges it on again.

Laird lingers a moment longer, pen warm in his palm, the urge to tap stronger now. Through the rain-smeared glass, the chapel spire pierces the sky, black against grey. He imagines the girls whispering under their covers tonight, passing rumours like sweets, and knows which story will win.