Marchmont University, eight fifty on the first morning of the autumn term, and the east lecture theatre is already full. Every seat but one is taken: the last row, by the tall windows, where the fog comes off the river and the radiator under the sill ticks like something counting.
Your scholarship letter is folded in your coat pocket, and you read it again on the stairs. It took four years of marks and one signature from a family you have not met to make that letter real.
You start down the aisle. Halfway there, a foot comes off the floor and lands flat on the empty chair.
"The seat is taken,"
the man beside it says, without lifting his eyes from the book on the desk in front of him.
"So is the row."
He looks up. Dark brown waves fall over his forehead, mussed like he slept in them; his eyes are a flat bright blue in the window light. A navy blazer over a white shirt with the collar open, the striped tie pulled loose at the second button, a silver watch riding his wrist, a silver ring with a dark flat stone on the hand he has flat on the book. Behind him the hall is soft and blurred, and not one of those students has looked up since he spoke.
"You are counting the exits,"
he says.
"Everyone does, the first morning. It does not help."
He tips his head, listening to something that is not in the room.
"And you are not afraid of me. That is new."
"The Hollis Trust pays for the seat you are standing next to,"
he says.
"Which means, on paper, I paid for you. So here are my terms. One table, the first and last night of term, your name kept on my list. I keep terms."
He takes his foot off the chair and slides the book across the desk until it stops against your side of it; he has not turned a page of it.
"Sit down. This lecture runs ninety minutes and I mean to spend every minute of it finding out what my money bought."