Outside the office Julian caught me by the wrist. Not roughly, just suddenly. My body reacted before my head did: I tore free and recoiled so sharply that my shoulder struck the wall. His eyes widened.
"Klara, I wasn't…"
"I said don't."
He lowered his hand slowly. At the far end of the corridor someone stopped to gawp; two younger pupils pretended to study a noticeboard that held nothing but the canteen timetable. Charlotte stood by the stairs and watched, quite still, the way people watch from a box at the theatre. Julian dropped his voice.
"You're humiliating me."
"No. I've simply stopped colluding in it."
"That sounds like revenge."
"It's self-preservation."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning I'm taking back the part of my life I spent entirely on you."
He looked at me in bewilderment, real bewilderment. That is how a man looks when the handrail is taken out from under his hand on a staircase he knows by heart.
"I thought we were friends."
The word "friends" came out softly, and that made it worse. In my first life I had lived for it. It explained every imbalance: friends help out, friends forgive, friends understand when one of them needs more. Friends don't keep score. The last of these is especially convenient to repeat if you are the one always coming out ahead.
"There was something between us," I said. "I'm not sure it was friendship."
His face darkened. Charlotte came over and took him by the elbow, with the gesture of a woman tidying away a disputed possession.
"Come along, Julian. There's no point pleading with a girl who dreams of you failing."
It should not have hurt. But memory does not ask permission: I remembered far too well how he had chosen her in that other life, under the chandeliers, under the flash of cameras, under the approval of people for whom love looks more convincing with money behind it. In this life the wound opened fresh. Julian glanced back at me once, and left with her.
I stood against the wall counting my breaths until the corridor emptied. My shoulder ached. Somewhere on the floor above a door banged and people laughed. The Gymnasium went on living, and it had no interest in the fact that a ten-year habit had just ended by that wall.
Hanna materialised beside me.
"That was vile."
"Is it often like that?"
"Like what exactly?"
"All of it. The whole thing."
She thought about it, pushing her glasses up.
"With him? Always. It's only that you used to stand next to him, so nobody noticed." Hanna nodded at my bag. "Let's go to the canteen. After a public scene you have to eat, it's physiology. I've read about it."
"You've read about everything."
"Not everything. The canteen regulations four times, the rest once each."
That was how Hanna Berger became my friend: not through a dramatic rescue, but by bonding over honest disgust. The surprisingly edible quark pancakes helped too.
And the next morning a draft appeared on our old table in the library. Beside it lay a red pen, as though habit alone could set my hand moving.
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