The ceremony was held in the same east hall where I had stood that winter in a borrowed black dress. This time the dress was my own – blue, bought with the first money the Open Ladder ever paid me: two districts had already plugged the platform into their spring optional classes, and for the first time in my life my work had a line in a budget instead of a line in somebody else's acknowledgements.
Mum sat in the third row. She had come through the operation at the end of February and the course of treatment was almost over; she had cut her hair short before the course even began and announced that she had always wanted to – there had simply never been an occasion. Hanna sat beside her and, judging by her lips, was counting how many times the word "resilience" would come off the stage. On Mum's other side, Mila's mother had settled in with a bunch of yellow tulips wrapped in the shop's best paper.
"The national scholarship of the Arnsberg Foundation," said the host, "is awarded to Klara Mohr, Eberwald Gymnasium, for the Open Ladder project."
What came after that I remember by its sound: Mum's hands clapping first, a fraction of a second ahead of everyone else's.
On stage the host read from his card: top of her year, first in the selection exam, author of the platform, "by her teachers' accounts, devoted to her work". The word found me even here, two lives on, on the best day of either of them. I walked up to the microphone and did not step around the word.
"Somebody once said of me, 'She's very devoted'," I began. "At the time it meant: convenient. The girl whose hours cost nothing, whose name you don't have to remember. It took me years to understand a simple thing: devotion is a question of direction. Today I am devoted. To my own work. To my own people – my mother, my friend, my teacher, the first pupil on my platform. And to myself. There is nothing shameful about that order: a ladder is steadier when more than one person holds it."
In the third row Mum was pressing a hand to her mouth. Hanna was giving me a thumbs-up. In the trustees' row, Mrs von Ahlenberg was watching me closely and almost without dislike – the way one looks at an asset that was underpriced at the first valuation.
Charlotte came up first, once the official part was over. She wore a pale pink dress, pearl clips and immaculate posture, but no cosmetics could hide her tiredness.
"Congratulations," she said. "You won fairly. In my family that counts as exotic."
"Thank you for coming."
"I'm not here for you." She smiled with one corner of her mouth. "I'm practising losing. They say adult life costs more without that skill."
She was gone before I could decide what that had been: a surrender, a compliment, or the first honest sentence of our whole acquaintance. Probably all three at once. Charlotte's arithmetic had failed her in one place only: people are not securities, and you cannot assemble a portfolio out of them.
And by the doors of the hall, off to one side of the well-wishers, stood Julian. There were no flowers in his hands. In his hands there was a folder – creased, with the old coffee stain in the corner.
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