Page 36 of See Me After Class

From the way he lived quietly in his little cottage on the grounds, nobody could have guessed that he could have easily afforded a mega-yacht and a fleet of private planes. I had no idea, certainly, and I didn't think I needed to hold back on splurging, since I was essentially arriving at a new place, with a new identity.

But the way Galbraith saidSo you were poor before this, like I hadPatheticLittleOrphantattooed on my forehead—that made me feel exposed and furious and panicky. He wasn't supposed to be asking questions about my background. It was meant to be the other way around.

I crept up the last few steps to the junior staff floor and checked the landing. All clear. Not a soul awake apart from me, my guilty conscience, and John Galbraith somewhere a couple of floors below.

Once I was ensconced safely back in my room, I hurriedly stripped off my clothes and made for the shower in my tiny, attached bathroom. It took an effort not to linger over all the ways John and Leon had touched me, the different kinds of marks they had both left on my skin.

Afterward, I settled down in bed with my phone turned off and a slim canvas dossier on my lap. I had studying to do, and Ms. Wainwright would be rightly disappointed if I didn't add the information she had given me to the research I had already gathered.

It was now just past one thirty in the morning. The wind must have died down, though I only had a narrow window on the far side of my bed through which to hear it. Perhaps the electricity of the storm had affected my brain and tricked me into falling into Galbraith's arms so easily.

I tried to focus on the folder.

Galbraith, John. Son of Ted and Marianne Galbraith, born in Newark, New Jersey. Oldest of eight siblings, four brothers and three sisters.

Eight siblings.Eight. For someone like me, raised in permanent solitude, it felt like an overabundance of blessings.

I wondered if all his siblings had that same unforgiving, granite face, if they were all as successful and intimidating as he was.

I remembered something I'd read somewhere, about psychopathic kids going on to become either successful CEOs or successful serial killers later in life, and I wondered if his mother had ever noticed anything abnormal about him.

The origin story of a ruthless murderer, I reflected sleepily. There was a reason I had been attracted to child psychology in the first place. Everyone had a story, a reason they turned out the way they did in the end. A series of clues to their past, levers that could be pulled and pushed to influence their future behavior.

I checked the names of John's siblings again. James, Paul, Luke and Simon, Leah, Ruth, and Naomi. Names picked out of the Bible, in the good old-fashioned way.

And yet John Galbraith would not be the first to violatethou shalt not kill,would he? I just needed to understand what would push him to that point. Maybe I'd find out tomorrow.

I wondered if Oswald had liked him, had perhaps even enjoyed talking to him when they met. On that thought, my eyes drifted shut and I fell asleep.

The next morning,I was in a mad rush. I had overslept and was therefore horribly late to the first meeting I had scheduled for the day, with the head of Psychiatry, one Doctor Sturry.

He frowned at me as I knocked quietly and entered the teaching gallery in the right-hand wing of the house.

"Ah," he said, peering over thick half-moon glasses. "Dr. Davenport, is it? Glad to finally meet you."

"Yes, Dr. Sturry," I said breathlessly. "I'm sorry for being late. I'm only just starting to find my way around the building."

"Well, next time, try to plan ahead," he said dismissively. One of the others in the small group of junior doctors on staff already gathered in the room gave me a sympathetic glance. "I have just handed out the training schedules for the week. How many clinic hours are you down for?"

"I have six at the moment, but I'm flexible, sir," I said, trying to appease him. It would be disastrous if I got on his bad side this early. "I've also had a patient transferred from my previous practice, but her appointments will be conducted remotely."

"Remotely." He snorted. "In my day, psychiatry was supposed to be a personal, private matter, not a tiny person on a screen. It's ridiculous."

The woman who'd given me that sympathetic glance earlier nearly rolled her eyes. A man next to her scoffed openly.

"We've just been through a global nightmare of a deadly virus, Dr. Sturry," he pointed out. "Was our entire profession supposed to go on hold for the duration of lockdown and quarantines and all the other trauma we've collectively endured? More people are in therapy than ever before. We're all managing the best we can."

Dr. Sturry didn't seem to enjoy the interruption, but instead of replying to the male speaker, he pointed an outraged finger at me.

"You're got children on your Zoom, have you? Children! How are they supposed to benefit from a tinny voice over loudspeakers telling them anything, eh? What happened to the human touch?"

"There's a whole mini-generation of babies now who were born in isolation and learned to socialize only on electronic devices," I replied quietly. "They're used to it because they don't know anything else. It's the parents and grandparents I feel sorry for, mostly. They're the ones who have to cope with a world they no longer understand."

Dr. Sturry, who couldn't have been a day less than sixty, glared furiously at me. There it was.Boomer outrage incoming.

I waited, my hands curled tensely at my sides. But after a moment, Dr. Sturry's expression changed to one of resignation.

"I suppose you're right," he said wearily. "Even before the pandemic, I was getting too old for this nonsense."

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