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touch him, to hold him, to make him hers again. She drops to her knees and rests her head in his lap. As Tommy strokes her hair, so softly, so tenderly, she feels the fall of his tears on her cheeks and she believes, for the briefest of moments, that everything will be okay, that their love will be strong enough to heal everything, to swallow this hurt, to absorb it, to eventually forget it altogether. They are strong enough to do this, she is strong enough, Cosima knows this. And then, she realizes something.
    “But…” She pulls her head from his lap and looks up. “Why are you telling me all this now? If it was—the phone call? What was it? What happened?”
    Tommy drops his head again. His voice is muffled, almost inaudible but Cosima already feels sick, already knows.
    “She…” Tommy whispers, “she—she’s…”
    And, even though he can’t bring himself to say the word, Cosima still hears it, a piercing cry in the silence, signaling the death of her hope and the complete shattering of her heart.

N OA HURRIES ALONG Magdalene Street toward Heather’s house. It’s late, nearly midnight, but it’s also Friday night, which means her aunt will be baking bread. She’s been doing it since Noa was a little girl, filling the house with the gorgeous scent of doughy yeast until every room smelled like a bakery. Noa loves baking night, not the actual weighing and measuring and kneading, but sitting in the breakfast nook with a milky coffee to keep her awake while watching Heather bake.
    In the distance she hears the King’s College clock chime the twelve strokes of midnight, and starts to run. Just before the bridge, Noa stops to catch her breath. Her hands on her sides, she tilts her head back to look up at the sky when she’s splashed with liquid. Noa wipes her face with the back of her hand and frowns. It isn’t raining. Then she realizes it isn’t water, but wine. Noa squints up in the darkness, thinking she sees a shadow of someone up in the turrets of Magdalene College, and then another someone, and then another.
    “Hey!” Noa calls out. “What are you doing up there?”

    The shadows freeze.
    “I can still see you,” she yells. “I’ve already seen you.”
    Silence.
    And then the moon slips out from behind a patch of cloud and Noa can see one of the shadows more clearly, though she can hardly believe it.
    “Professor Bisset? Is that you?”
    A faint curse echoes from the turret, then a hushed voice.
    “Wait there.”
    Noa, wondering what on earth is going on, waits.
    When Amandine pushes open the heavy wooden door of the college and steps out onto the pavement, she hurries straight over to Noa, who’s frowning.
    “Professor Bisset? Are you drunk?”
    “No, of course not!”
    “Then why are you sitting on the rooftop? Or, rather, hovering above it.”
    Instead of answering, Amandine whispers a simple forgetting spell she learned from Kat a few years before.
    “ Reminiscere quod vidi. Oblitus quod vides. Reminiscere quod vidi. Oblitus quod vides.”
    “What are you doing?” Noa raises an eyebrow as she sees another of Amandine’s secrets. “You’re trying to cast a spell on me.”
    While Noa gasps, Amandine sighs. Of all the people who could have seen them, it had to be her strange student, the one who can see people’s secrets. When confronted with awkward questions from overinquisitive passersby before, she’d always been able to cover her tracks and protect the book group with forgetting, mystifying, or confusion spells. But she can see none of them will work on Noa.

    “What are you doing up there?”
    Seeing she has no other alternative, Amandine answers.
    “That’s pretty cool,” Noa says. “Can I join?”
    Amandine starts to shake her head and form her lips into the word no, but somehow finds herself nodding and saying yes instead.
    “Great, thanks.” Noa smiles. “How do I get up there? You don’t fly, do you?”
    Amandine casts her student a curious glance, wondering