For a while after that, things were good. As the summer came to an end, and the fall semester approached, Lennon mastered the ability to open gates to the past with an amount of stamina and skill that, frankly, startled her. She spent her evenings with Dante, largely in darkness, the two of them twined together on the couch or in bed or in the ocean once, on one of the hottest days of the summer, when even in the dead of night the rolling surf was as warm as bathwater.

“I misread him before,” said Lennon on the phone to Carly, one Saturday morning while Dante was out swimming his laps. He’d encouraged her to keep in touch with her family, something that surprised Lennon given the strict school policies at Drayton that largely discouraged any outside contact. “He’s…kind. Really kind. I want you to meet him someday, properly.”

Carly was quiet on the line. “You’re really happy, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Lennon, smiling as she said it. And then: “All of that stuff I wanted you to look into, you can just drop it. Actually, I think it’s best if you do. I think it was just the stress of school getting to me. But things are different now. Better. I think they’re the best I can ever remember them being.”

“If you say so,” said Carly.

As the days passed, Lennon very pointedly thought of Drayton less and less, wanting to preserve her time with Dante—the precious minutiae of a simple and, yes, even tedious life well lived, where she got to be the kind of person she’d always hoped to become: stable, confident, and entirely fulfilled. But despite her longing for things to remain the same, Drayton beckoned.

“You’re ready,” said Dante that evening, as they prepared to leave for Eileen’s house, where Lennon would demonstrate all that she’d learned that summer to the vice-chancellor. Both she and Dante had dressed up for the occasion, Dante in a collared shirt and Lennon in a pair of well-ironed slacks and a blouse they’d purchased from a shop in town.

“But what if I make a mess of it?” Lennon asked, putting words to the anxiety that had plagued her since the day Dante had first put forth the idea of her opening gates to the past.

“You won’t,” he said. “You’re their hope of salvation, and tonight you’ll make Eileen see that clearly.”

After dinner, they drove up the sun-scorched coast to Charleston, a trip that took just shy of two hours. Eileen lived in a waterfront neighborhood downtown. The house itself was tall and white, its windows reflected the light of a fiery sunset, which made it look as though it was burning on the inside.

Dante knocked on the door and another Dante answered—at least that was what Lennon first thought when she saw the boy who stood opposite them. It took her a moment to even register their differences—the fact that he was shorter, with lighter skin. In fact, he was so alabaster pale that Lennon could see the green veins tracing delicately across his furrowed brow.

Seeing him in the threshold, Lennon felt her heart launch itself to the pit of her stomach, where it remained, pounding so violently she was certain that both Dante and the boy could hear it. What was a boy—who Lennon knew with crystalline certainty was Dante’s son; she would’ve known it if she’d just passed him on the street—doing in Eileen’s house? She looked to Dante for an answer, but he betrayed nothing. Didn’t even look at her. His son did, though.

When his gaze fell to Lennon, she was staggered by the force of his will. If she hadn’t known he was Dante’s son from first appearance, she would have sensed it the moment his searching mind made contact with hers. It took her breath away. In the wake of him, Lennon felt like a nesting rabbit in the path of a lawn mower.

“Where’s your mom?” Dante asked the boy.

And it was then that Lennon put it together: this boy was Dante’s and Eileen’s. No wonder his will was so formidable. He was the child of two of the most powerful persuasionists alive. And, for some reason, Dante had kept him hidden from her.

It wasn’t a lie, exactly, but it was certainly a betrayal.

And to make it worse, Dante kept complete composure, as if this were entirely mundane and not a cruel shock.

Just then, a man stepped into the foyer. He was handsome, in a leading-man-of-a-toothpaste-commercial sort of way. At the sight of Dante, standing in the foyer with his son, an expression passed over his face that Lennon couldn’t quite parse. Like he’d thought something nasty and quickly smothered it. “Professor Lowe, if I’d known you were coming tonight, I would’ve chilled one of the good bottles of port.”

The two men clasped hands and dragged each other into an embrace that would’ve appeared warm if not for the expression of pain that twisted across the man’s face when Dante pulled him near. He locked eyes with Lennon. “Is this…?”

Dante sidestepped, nodded. “My advisee. Lennon.”

“So it is,” he said. “Lovely to put a face to a name. I’ve heard so much about you.”

Lennon snapped to attention. Set her feelings aside. She knew if she wanted to return to Drayton, now was the time to perform. “Most of it bad, I assume?”

“All of it, actually.” He laughed from the belly. “You’ve caused my wife quite some trouble. I’m Anthony, by the way. And this is Oliver.”

Lennon shook his outstretched hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“You should send her up,” said Anthony to Dante. “Only way out is through.”

“How is she?” Dante asked.

“She’s been better. But you’re here now, and that’ll cheer her.”

“I doubt it.” Dante turned to Lennon then, said nothing, but the strangest sensation came over Lennon’s mind—prickling pins and needles, like a limb with no blood flow—and she heard a voice that was like Dante’s but not speak clearly from the recesses of her mind: Say as little as you can.

Anthony, perhaps a little rudely, gave Lennon directions to the room where Eileen was waiting for her instead of showing her himself. Lennon walked upstairs alone, hung a tight left at the hall’s end, and found her way to the primary bedroom through a tall, haint-blue door. The bedroom was so dark that for a moment, before her eyes adjusted, Lennon could see nothing but the black silhouette of a person sitting in a chair across the room. The figure shifted; a lamp clicked on, and there was Eileen nestled in a large armchair, a quilt drawn over her lap, in a small sitting room just off the bedroom.

“Lennon,” she said, with a smile. She extended a hand, her fingers as long and elegant as the rest of her, and motioned to the empty chair beside her. “Come in, please. Sit with me.”

Lennon sat down in the empty armchair beside her. It was printed with a black-and-white toile pattern that—upon closer inspection—depicted the antebellum south, women in hoopskirts with their hair piled high and behind them, sparsely rendered, the dark figures of what might’ve been slaves in the distance. Though the sketches were so small, and the room so dim, it was impossible to tell.

“I do apologize for the lack of light,” said Eileen, smoothing the blanket drawn over her lap. “I get these headaches, clusters. They’re terrible, and the light makes them worse.”

“I don’t mind the dark.”

“Dante said the same the first time he came here. My headaches were bad that year. We used to spend the entirety of our class period in total darkness, just so that the pain was manageable enough for me to speak.”

Eileen leaned forward to tug open the drawer on the side table that stood between them, withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, carved to look like the head of a snake. She lit a cigarette without offering one to Lennon, and for a while they dwelled together in silence, Eileen spitting smoke, and Lennon looking at Eileen, then the floor, and then nothing at all, allowing her eyes to blur out of focus. She suddenly felt so tired.

“Dante was the first student I ever mentored,” said Eileen. “One could also argue he was the student that all but passed me the keys to the vice-chancellorship, but that’s a story for a different evening. We’re not here to speak about him or me. We’re here to find a solution for the problem of you.”

Lennon shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

“The call is deceptive,” said Eileen, and at first Lennon took this to be figurative but then quickly realized that it was a literal reference to the call she’d received all those months ago in the parking lot of that abandoned mall. The call that had first brought her to Drayton. “It seems like an easy thing at first. It was the same for me. For everyone, really. People like us, we’ve been waiting our whole lives to be told we’re special. But soon after starting at Drayton, you learn that our path is not one to be taken lightly. There is sacrifice demanded, to access a power like ours. It is a painful, at times terrible, thing. And this is truer of you than it is any of your classmates. I do pity you for that. But what I think you fail to realize is that your position at Drayton is a gift, too. One that few receive. You should consider yourself immensely lucky to have it.”

Eileen delivered the last of this statement with a jagged edge of anger. “That gift is the only reason you will be allowed to return to Drayton next semester. There, you will continue to perform your duties at Logos, in accordance with your station there. Whatever core curriculum classes you have yet to complete, you will. And you’ll do all of this with the gentle pacificism of someone who knows that any act of violence—however small—will result in the deadening of their brain stem. Am I quite clear?”

“Yes,” said Lennon, in a husky, tear-thick whisper. “I understand.”

“And are you ready to show me the fruit of your efforts this summer?”

Lennon nodded and began to call an elevator. But Eileen stopped her before she had the chance, entering into her mind with a strange sensation that began at the base of Lennon’s spine. It was pleasant at first, a sort of humming or trilling that sang through her nervous system, building as the moments passed. Her legs went soft beneath her. Her pelvis numb. She felt herself slide—as if turned to liquid—from the chair. The seizing began as soon as her head struck the floor, a series of racking convulsions over which she had no control, her limbs thrashing with a violence that felt near to bone-breaking. Her lungs seized up; she couldn’t breathe, and still Eileen took and took and took from her, turning through her memories of the summer with a violence, like a person flipping through the pages of a book so hard that they ripped and tore in half, splitting the spine. Any attempts she made to keep secrets—like her affair with Dante—were futile.

Eileen saw and took it all.

It was a strange feeling but a decidedly familiar one. And Lennon wondered just how many times Eileen had glimpsed within her mind without her ever knowing it. How many of her secrets had been exposed? Was there any part of Lennon left that Eileen didn’t see or know?

“Eileen, enough.” Dante spoke from the shadows. “You’ve seen what you needed to see. You know she can open gates to the past.”

“Just a little more,” said Eileen. “She needs to understand.”

“She’s suffocating.”

“Let her.”

Lennon, looking up, her face screwed with pain, saw that Dante had come to stand behind Eileen’s chair. He braced his hands on her shoulders, hunched over slightly, his figure backlit by the lamp. He lowered his lips to Eileen’s ear. Said something that Lennon couldn’t hear. But whatever it was made Eileen stiffen in her chair, her hold on Lennon slackening, then releasing completely. Lennon, gasping and trembling with pain, cowered on the floor.

Eileen stood then and stepped over Lennon as she made for the bedroom door. “I look forward to seeing you at the start of our next semester.”