The man introduced himself on the phone as Michael Tayson, the new Swithin headmaster. “We haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet,” he said.“Ah, yes, of course,” Sylvie said quickly, sitting up straighter. It was almost 9 p.m. on a Sunday night.  A strangely intimate time, she thought, for a chat.

“What can I do for you?”“We have a bit of a situation,” Michael Tayson said.For a moment, Sylvie wondered if she’d fallen through a pocket in time. Her sons, Charles and Scott, were still teenagers. They were upstairs intheir rooms, doing their homework—or, in Scott’s case, not doing his homework—and it was Jerome Cunningham, the old headmaster, on the phone instead. He hadn’t retired yet, the boys hadn’t graduated yet, and James . . . well, James was still here, too, upstairs behind his closed office door. He could walk downstairs and she could still talk to him.“One of our students passed away this morning,” Michael Tayson went on, bringing her back to the present. “We’re not sure how, but there are suspicions it might have been a suicide. His name was Christian Givens, a freshman. One of the scholarship boys.”Sylvie murmured how terrible that was, how sorry she felt for the family. All her years on the board, they’d had a few deaths—some car accidents,a case of Hodgkin’s lymphoma—but never a suicide, thank God. Was he looking for suggestions about memorial services? {MORE}