Colin had only just started speaking to his mother again. He still wasn’t speaking to his sister, Serena, the weak link, the deciding one-third vote that had enabled his stepfather, Jeremy, to get away with inviting DreamStone to film at Selwick Hall. It was Serena’s defection that hurt Colin the most, even more than seeing his beloved home, the one he had gone to such trouble to restore and maintain, trampled under the feet of Micah Stone and his merry men.

Both Colin’s great-aunt Arabella and I had made tentative gestures towards a reconciliation with Serena, but Colin had shot down all of our attempts. I wasn’t pushing it. My own position in his life was too new and too tenuous to risk.

Tenuous and possibly about to end.

Abandoning the window, I turned back reluctantly to the computer screen. The e-mail was still there. It hadn’t obligingly zapped itself back into cyberspace in the past five minutes.

Damn.

On the face of it, there was nothing about the e-mail to occasion forebodings of dread and gloom. No threats, no dire warnings, no offers to make my manhood throb more manfully or share a bank account in Rwanda. It was a perfectly pleasant e-mail from the Modern Germany professor offering me two sections and the position of head teaching fellow for his Modern Europe course.

Not entirely my area of expertise, but still better than that semester I had wound up teaching Charlemagne, unable to tell my Carolingians from my Carolinas. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the twentieth century, but I had done a field in it, so I could teach it, and the head TF position came with an extra financial incentive, payback for being the one in the unenviable position of playing middleman between a busy professor, demanding students, angsty teaching staff, and the entire administrative panoply involved in booking rooms, scheduling sections, printing course packets, and making nice to the A/V people.