The reflection was small, ghostly, and distorted. And she had all but the barest comer of her eye on the word she was writing.

Robert changed.

She caught just a flicker of it, just a frightening glimpse of Robert's face changing into something… different.

She whirled around, face white, barely noticing the protesting stab of pain in her back.

Robert looked at her blandly, questioningly. His hands were neatly folded. The first signs of an afternoon cowlick showed at the back of his head. He did not look frightened.

I imagined it, she thought. I was looking for something, and when there was nothing, my mind just made something up. Very cooperative of it. However.

“Robert?” She meant to be authoritative; meant for her voice to make the unspoken demand for confession. It did not come out that way.

“Yes, Miss Sidley?” His eyes were a very dark brown, like the mud at the bottom of a slow-running stream.

“Nothing.”

She turned back to the board. A little whisper ran through the class.

“Be quiet!” she snapped, and turned again to face them. “One more sound and we will all stay after school with Jane!” She addressed the whole class, but looked most directly at Robert. He looked back with childlike innocence: Who, me? Not me, Miss Sidley.

She turned to the board and began to write, not looking out of the corners of her glasses. The last half-hour dragged, and it seemed that Robert gave her a strange look on the way out. A look that said, We have a secret, don't we?

The look wouldn't leave her mind. It was stuck there, like a tiny string of roast beef between two molars – a small thing, actually, but feeling as big as a cinderblock.

She sat down to her solitary dinner at five (poached eggs on toast) still thinking about it. She knew she was getting older and accepted the knowledge calmly. She was not going to be one of those old-maid schoolmarms dragged kicking and screaming from their classes at the age of retirement. They reminded her of gamblers unable to leave the tables while they were losing. But she was not losing. She had always been a winner.