By nine on Friday morning the internet had decided that Imran Haddad was a tragic figure, and by ten he had lost eleven lessons.

It happened the way weather happens in Lindenfall, in a single front sweeping across the whole city. A photograph of two people on granite steps. A caption with the word *parted*. A hashtag that someone, somewhere, was paid to think of. Then the replies, which arrived in thousands, with the hot, tender speed of people who have been waiting for a villain to be undone and are not at all sure who the villain is.

*Told you. She's a snake.*

*Poor guy. He actually defended her.*

*Rooting for the Dancing Sergeant!! 🥺*

*Plot twist: she got her promotion and dropped him. Classic Reaper.*

*Wait is he single now?? asking for my mum*

Wim read them aloud from the passenger seat of Brenda while Imran drove the ring road in the rain, and by the fourth he had stopped being able to continue. "Sorry," he said. "They're just very, very rude about her. And then they're nice about you. And then they're rude about her again. It's like watching a seesaw with a lot of knives."

"Don't read any more."

"I wasn't going to, sorry. Except there's one from a woman in Leeds who made a song, and she's done a second verse."

"Wim."

"Putting it away."

The cancellations came in a trickle and then a stream. A mother who "wanted to wait and see how things settled." A pair of cousins whose father "felt uneasy about the whole situation." A man who simply wrote, *no hard feelings but I can't be seen*, and followed it with a thumbs-up, the most terrible punctuation known to humankind. Imran took each message on the chin and ticked it off the board in the office, one name at a time, in the red pen he kept for emergencies. By noon the board looked like a field after an engagement.

It was what Walter had meant. He saw that now, driving through the wet, with the wipers going and the brass of the town clock sliding past like a medal. A man whose fiancée has dropped him for promotion is not a hero any more. He is a warning. He is something people cross the road to avoid, because failure is catching, and the Vault knows it. *Handsome sum.* Of course. All Walter had to do was wait for the school to starve.

"Are we all right?" said Wim, quietly, at a red light.

"We're fine."

"Because I was thinking, sorry, that I could take a pay cut."

"You're on cash and apology. You can't take a cut from that."

"Well, I could take less apology."

In spite of himself, Imran laughed. It was a short, rusty sound, and the car seemed to relax around it. At the green he drove on, and the rain eased, and Wim, beside him, folded his long arms and said, with great dignity, in the voice of a man making a statement to the press: "She's not left you, you know."

"I know."

"She'd never. She's the sort of person who'd leave you a reference."

"Wim."

"I'm just saying, she posted a picture of her hand with no ring on it, and she's the sort of person who counts the grains of rice in a bowl. She'd have noticed. She'd have *known.*" He sniffed. "It's a clue."

"It's a staged photo."

"All photos are staged. The question is what's in the corner."

Imran glanced at him. Wim's face was turned to the window, wet with reflected rain, young and plain and earnest. "That's actually a very good point," Imran said, and Wim went pink to the roots of his hair.

The afternoon brought other visitors. Mrs Okonkwo-Reyes arrived at three, from the launderette, with a flask of soup and her phone in her other hand. She did not say anything for the first minute. She poured soup into a mug. She set it down on the desk beside the red pen and stood with her hands on her hips, a stout figure in a floral overall, regarding him with the severity of a woman who has spent forty years finding out what people leave in pockets.

"I've seen it," she said.

"Yes."

"I knew she'd do this."

"Mrs O..."

"Don't Mrs O me. I told you. She doesn't eat. She doesn't have friends. A woman like that, she'd leave a man for a desk." She sniffed. "But I'll say this. I've read all those stories under it. The comments. They're all so *pleased* with themselves, saying *I knew, I knew.* They didn't know. I've known you three years. You're a man who goes out in the cold to teach other people's children how to get home, and you've never once complained." She pushed the mug at him. "Drink."

He drank. It was chicken, with a great deal of pepper. He felt it move down through his chest like a warm hand.

"And she took the ring off for a reason," added Mrs Okonkwo-Reyes, darkly. "That one never took anything off for no reason in her life. I'd bet my best dryer."

Tamar rang at five. He let it go to voicemail. She rang again. He took it, standing in the yard in the drizzle, and her voice came through the phone like a hug: "Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, Imran. I'm so, so sorry. Are you okay? Do you need anything? I'm literally crying, Dex is literally crying, we're not going to post anything about it, I swear, we've turned off our stories. It's so awful. You two were *so* beautiful."

"I'm all right, Tamar."

"I know you're not." A rustle. A lowered voice. "Hey. Can I say something? Off the record?"

"Go on."

"I don't think she did it because she wanted to." There was a breathless catch. "The thing is, I watched her at the stream, when you said the soup thing. She looked like she'd been hit by a truck, in a good way. I've been in this game a long time. You can't fake that. I'd stake the Spoons on it." She laughed, wetly. "Which is a terrible thing to say, because we're up against you. But I mean it."

"Thanks."

"And Dex wanted me to say..." Her voice faltered. In the background Imran heard a low murmur, and a pause, and then Dex, further away, saying something short. "He says he's sorry," said Tamar. "For whatever he said. About whatever it was. I don't know what it was. He won't tell me. He's being weird."

"Tell him it's forgotten."

"Okay." A very small voice. "Imran? Are we, like, okay? Me and you?"

He looked at the rain on the tarmac, at the dented side of the Colonel and the straight sign on the door, WE GET YOU THERE, and the mark under it where EVENTUALLY had been rubbed away so many times that the paint had thinned. "We're fine," he said. "I think we might be the only people in Lindenfall who are."

The evening went by like a freight train. He ate toast over the sink. He drafted a long, careful message to Odette, three paragraphs, and deleted it. He wrote four words: *I haven't forgotten Appendix C.* He deleted that too. Bernie had warned him, in a flurry of voice notes, that Walter's people were watching Odette's phone, because the Society owned it and could read it. Anything he sent would be seen. Whatever she sent would be vetted. There was, according to Appendix C, only one way to tell him she wanted out, and she had not used it.

*Unless and until the cooperating Party states in writing, "I withdraw."*

She hadn't said it. So she hadn't withdrawn. So the performance was still running, and somewhere in a house he'd never seen, a woman in a camel coat was convincing a chairman that she was lost.

At eleven fifty-two, his phone buzzed on the arm of the sofa.

It was from her. It was a photograph, grainy, taken at an angle, as if the camera had been held at hip height and snapped without looking. It showed a cheese toastie in a paper wrapper, half-eaten, on a dashboard, beside a gearstick he did not recognise. Behind it, through a windscreen streaked with rain, the lit sign of a garage glowed orange: MILL LANE SERVICE STATION — OPEN 24 HRS.

There was no message. No words at all. Only, in the corner of the photograph, tucked in the lower left like a signature, a small garnet on a thin silver chain, swinging.

*A fact to be used only in the event of torture.*

He was out of the door before he finished reading it.

Mill Lane at midnight was a river of oily light. The garage sat at the corner of a roundabout, a squat canopy and a wet forecourt and a boy at the till reading a textbook. There were four cars. He recognised the second from its tidy parking, nose out, wheels straight, and the small silver Fiat with a clean dashboard and a lavender air freshener hanging from the mirror. He pulled in beside it and killed the engine.

The passenger window of the Fiat slid down.

Odette sat at the wheel in the dark, in her navy jumper, with her hair loose and her knees drawn up, eating a cheese toastie with the grim concentration of a woman who had not eaten since Wednesday. Her face was grey with tiredness. The garnet hung against her collarbone. She did not look at him. She looked straight ahead through the streaked glass at the orange lights.

"Get in," she said. "I have twelve minutes, and a chaperone."