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make your transition here easier, just let me know. I’m here for the students anytime. Even if you just need to talk . . . well, I’m available for that, too.”
    Tom went around the desk and shook Monica’s hand. “Monica, it was nice to see you again.” He searched her eyes for a clue, but she gave away nothing.
    She fixed her gaze on something behind his left shoulder and remained coolly distant. “Nice to see you, too.”
    â€œSame goes for you. If you need any help getting him settled in here, just give a call. Mrs. Berlatsky or I will be glad to help however we can.”
    â€œThank you.”
    They parted at his door, and he watched them walk away through the messy outer office, where someone had propped open the hall doors to dilute the strong paint smell. A radio was playing a Rod Stewart song. A copy machine set up a rhythmic shd-shd-shd while yellow papers flapped from it. Secretaries typed at their desks while a trio of teachers checked their mailboxes and chatted—everybody going about their business and not one of them suspecting what alife-altering shock had just befallen the man who led them all. He watched as Monica Arens and her son walked out of the office, crossed the hall, and exited through the set of propped-open outer doors into the sunny August day. He could tell they were talking as they strode down the sidewalk, stepped off the curb, and continued toward a new Lexus of a piercing aquamarine blue. The boy got behind the wheel, the engine started, and the sun glinted off the car’s clean, luminescent paint as it backed up, turned, and disappeared from his view.
    Only then did Tom Gardner move.
    â€œI don’t want to be disturbed for a while,” he told Dora Mae, as he entered his office. He closed the door, which was normally left open unless he was with a student. Alone, he flattened his vertebrae against the windowless door and let his head drop back against it. He felt all cinched up inside, as if a tree had fallen across his chest. His stomach quivered and held a knot of impending fear. He closed his eyes, trying to force the fear into submission.
    It didn’t work.
    Pulling away from the door, opening his eyes, he actually felt dizzy.
    He went to the window and stood in the slanting rays of late morning, one hand covering his mouth, the other wrapped across his ribs. Outside, in the arboretum, the sun striped the manicured grass, dappled the pruned trees, and faded the old-fashioned wooden picnic tables; in the distance it sketched a second, fallen chain-link fence at the foot of the one delineating the perimeter of the tennis courts; it whacked out large trapezoids of shadow from the visible half of the spectator stands; it lustered the cornfields behind them.
    Tom Gardner’s gaze registered none of it.
    Instead, he saw the handsome face of Kent Arens and the stricken, blushing one of Kent’s mother. Then later her closed expression and the air of detachment as she carefully avoided Tom’s eyes.
    God in heaven, could the boy be his?
    The dates matched.
    The third week of June 1975, the week of his marriage to Claire, who had been pregnant with Robby at the time. Staring sightlessly, he regretted that one breach of good sense eighteen years before, that single infidelity on the eve of his wedding, that sin for which he’d done silent penance earlier in his marriage but which had faded gradually as the years of absolute fidelity had built between himself and Claire.
    He dropped his hand from the heat of his own blush and felt a wad in his throat that stuck there like a piece of hard candy each time he swallowed. Maybe the boy wasn’t seventeen. Maybe he was sixteen . . . or eighteen! After all, not every senior was seventeen!
    But most were, and common sense told him Kent Arens was too tall and well developed to be only sixteen. It appeared he shaved every day, and his shoulders and chest muscles were those