“We wouldn’t want anything frivolous to appear on Henley’s faculty publication record,” she’d clucked.

After fourteen years, I was finally used to being addressed as Margaret Stone, my mother’s maiden name, when a puzzler fan emailed me.

Now here I was wearing pumps and what could pass for a suit, with a dark brown skirt and an almost-matching jacket, hoping to please the person who held my career in her wrinkled old hands. The thought produced another wave of perspiration and new, sweaty smudges on my leather briefcase. I wasn’t this nervous sitting next to Bruce in his helicopter, even when he surprised me with a new stunt.

To calm myself, I took a newly purchased cube puzzle from my briefcase, this one with six images of Tiffany windows, and set the case down on the immaculate floor.

Dr. Underwood was too old for the job, I decided, fingering the smaller blocks that made up the colorful cube. The academic dean seemed to have come with this building. I loved hundred-year-old buildings, but not the antiquated customs that sometimes accompanied them.

I knew that Dr. Underwood was upset for reasons bigger than me. Her side had lost the great debate about whether Henley College should follow the trend of the day and admit male students.

“Coed?” she’d exclaimed at meetings when the issue was first raised.

She’d made the word sound profane. The dean and her allies had fought the idea long and hard, citing the history of Henley, founded in the early part of the twentieth century as an academy for “young ladies.” There had been plenty of boys at the all-male schools a stone’s throw away to invite to mixers. If that model worked a hundred years ago, it could work now, the dean said in so many words, skipping past the fact that there wasn’t a single all-male school left in New England.