THREE MONTHS LATER

The girl's eyes wanted to quit, shuttering every few seconds, rolling up to oblivion, but Steph Reece stayed with it. She scooted up the bed, keeping the Bob Books early-reader paperback in four-year-old Ella's sightline.

"De..." she prompted, pointing to the title. "De...ah...ah..."

Ella's tongue found the roof of her mouth, which might have been the first consonant sound of "Dot."

"That's it, you can do it. Sound it out."

Steph grinned through the pain—her thumb and forefinger had been holding the book still for two minutes—and rounded her lips in an exaggerated, soft O.

Ella's head lolled. Her hair, champagne blonde like Steph's, pooled on the pillow.

"The book, sweetie, focus on the book."

Steph's voice produced only a twitch in her daughter's face. Again, her eyes waned. In another second, she was out.

With a sigh, Steph closed the book. She knew this was an abysmal time to try reading. Ella should be alert, rested, an hour and a half removed from a meal. What choice did she have, though? Both she and Doug had worked late, so dinner hadn't started until 6:45. It had taken a solid hour of exhorting and, in the case of seven-month-old Morgan, airplane-forking, to achieve a balanced meal. Afterward, they had bundled up for a walk (exercise plus nature), eaten raisins and apple wedges (fiber, important for Ella's reluctance to go number two), and by then it had been bedtime.

Now she smoothed Ella's hair off her cheek. Watched the tiny chest rise and fall. At once, Steph felt intense love and equally intense regret. How could you not make time for reading? She considered waking Ella, freshening her with a glass of water, offering some bribe.

Jesus, Steph. Don't be that parent.

She tucked the comforter about her daughter's shoulders and switched off the lamp.

Downstairs, Doug sat with his laptop on the couch. The Bulls on TV, sound off for the kids' benefit.

She took a step for the kitchen.

"Dishes are done," Doug said.

She pivoted for the playroom.

"Toys put away." He looked up with a playful grimace. "Froggy's airing out on the deck. I think he went overboard with hand sanitizer again."

Steph smiled, sauntered over to stand behind him. "Going to be up late?"

Doug shook his head. "Swapping dollars for rupees at seven a.m. sharp. You?"

"Afraid so."

"Oh, right—Nike tomorrow. Big day."

Steph sucked in a breath. "Let's hope."

"You're going to kill it." He eased a muscled arm around her waist. "That whole account is you. You made it happen."

She bent to give him a peck, then headed off to the study. The presentation was more or less locked, the partners having signed off at today's dry run, but now she pored over each slide with a red Sharpie, energizing headers, nixing weak bullet points.

Dunham & Prior had never worked for Nike. Three months ago, when Steph had sniffed out their new product launch in the emerging trail shoes market, Rich Hauser—her supervising partner—had said to mock up a deck if she wanted. Be a good exercise. When she'd hustled a meeting with the regional ad buyer, he had shrugged.

Now that they had gotten a meeting to pitch a potential campaign, Rich's tone had changed. During the dry run, he had shown fatherly pride, implying to the other partners that he and Steph had slaved together over the slides when, in fact, he'd only just seen them that morning.

This didn't bother Steph. As a junior person, you expected to do the legwork and have your boss take the credit.

Now, the deck as perfect as she could make it, Steph e-mailed it around. She jotted a note to her direct report, Chad Nimms, highlighting the changes to his section. Rich preferred that she present the whole thing, but Steph—determined to do right in her first managerial role—had insisted on giving Chad the exposure.

Chad immediately texted back, Love the changes! They can't say no! #SwooshIsOurs

Steph smiled at Chad's millennial enthusiasm, knowing that Nike, headquartered two thousand miles away in Oregon, was still a long shot. So had been winning the lead in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and competing at debate nationals. And the public-school daughter of a seamstress graduating summa cum laude from Stanford.

It was eleven thirty. Doug's footfalls upstairs had ceased long ago. Tattletail was a purring fluff ball on the heating vent. Yawning, Steph powered down her computer. The house chores were ostensibly done, but Steph, unable to let go of the day, began a fresh sweep of downstairs, rinsing water glasses, tidying the girls' art area, tapping back a note to Chad reminding him to study the click-rate backup materials...

Throughout this final burst, Steph felt pushed by a relentless dissatisfaction. At breakfast, she had wanted to have Ella's birthday arrangements finalized. At the beginning of March—today was the fifteenth—she had wanted to have a Lean In–style women's luncheon established at work and have begun reading the New York Times cover to cover. On New Year's Day, resolution number one had been establishing a foothold in local politics. Her wall calendar, once a slate of clear possibility-rich boxes, was scribbled over with growth percentiles and jottings about Nike—whose pursuit was probably a lark, tomorrow's meeting just a courtesy distracting her from actual paying clients.

Before doubts darkened to despair and she got to the point of writing off her midtwenties for a loss, Steph stopped herself.

You have a rocket ship of a career. (Rich Hauser's words.) Your husband amazes you. Your kids are weird and wonderful, and no brattier than anybody else's.

Today was over, fine. The Times would send another paper tomorrow—and there'd be a style section to boot.

She ducked outside to switch off the porch lights. Just past the threshold, her feet tripped on something. A FedEx envelope. Express overnight shipment.

Prying open the tear strip, Steph fished out a single paper. Her eyes took a moment adjusting to the moonlight. When they did, when those first words resolved themselves, her heart lurched. For an instant, she thought she would faint—and Steph Reece was no fainter.

The letter began:

To: The Winners

#

Steph decided to wait for breakfast to discuss the letter with Doug. He had the big currency swap, so she let him sleep, shouldering the burden herself, her mind drifting back nearly a decade to high school. Those bright, towering emotions. Pride. Elation. Teeth-grinding sorrow. Episodes that lived on forever: a tearful conversation at prom, a might've-been on the shores of Lake Michigan, that first summer with a car when you felt adult and in control of events...even if you weren't. Not even close.

The alarm woke her rudely at 6:10. Steph slogged to the kitchen, where Doug was drinking coffee with his laptop. Two baby monitors fizzed peacefully.

The FedEx sat on the table.

"Did you read that?" Steph asked.

Doug looked past his screen, perplexed, then saw where Steph's eyes were aimed. "Yeah, I did. High drama."

He sipped his coffee.

Steph, ceaselessly amazed by the male need to project unflappability, read the letter fresh.

To: The Winners

From: Becky Brindle

Hi fellow Wildkits! I hope this note finds you well! I am sending copies of this letter to four of you who were extremely close (and are extremely smart!!) to Mr. Fiske. As you may or may not know, I am a counselor at Evanston Township now and have the unfortunate task of informing you that our old teacher/coach/mentor is in trouble!

Without going into details, which I hesitate to put in writing, the situation does NOT look good! Please please PLEASE, if you are at all able, join me for an emergency meeting at the school tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. My office is 127b, in the fine arts hall.

Yours Truly, Becky

Steph could hear Becky's voice perfectly, each bubbly concern and breathless single or double exclamation mark. They had seen each other over tapas last weekend as part of a larger group. Why wouldn't Becky have called or texted? Why the trouble of a FedEx?

Last night, Steph had considered reaching out to Becky herself but had decided it was too late. Now she pulled up the contact. "Can I text somebody at six fifteen?"

Doug glanced around his mug. "I've sent thirty-seven so far."

"Right. To Mumbai." Steph, barefoot, knocked his shin under the table. "Think I'd be waking her up?"

"It's a text. If she's asleep, she keeps sleeping."

Steph swiped out a quick note: Becks, your letter really scares me. What's going on w/ Fiske?

"Is it possible Mr. Fiske got fired?" she asked.

Doug crimped his brow. "Nah, we would've heard. Probably just another dust-up with Mancini."

Bob Fiske and Principal Mancini had been rivals since time immemorial. Where Mancini was the face of secondary-school convention, religiously frugal, ever banning the latest questionable jacket or hat style, Fiske lived at the vanguard. Fiske had lobbied early for Title IX–style gender equity and mandatory campus nutrition. His passions landed him in frequent standoffs with the administration, and his stubbornness, which he freely acknowledged and attributed to two tours in Vietnam, guaranteed messy resolutions. During Steph's freshman year, appalled by the decision to cut Latin, he had insisted on recouping the program's cost by pushing the night janitor's slop bucket.

Steph distractedly poured Ella's whole milk into her cereal instead of skim. "I don't know. Becky sounds awfully worked up."

"Becks has been worked up since that Naperville field party, first time she tried Boone's."

"Oh, no fair." Steph grimaced mildly. "She's changed a lot since school."

Morgan's monitor crackled. Moments later, after the suck-suck of a missed pacifier, she cried. Husband and wife looked at one another wearily. Already? Steph began to rise, but Doug waved her back to her cereal.

She checked her phone for Becky's reply.

Nothing.

In another minute, Ella woke too, and the household was consumed by child-processing. Steph and Doug moved deftly between crises, he containing Morgan's diaper blowout with a plastic newspaper sleeve, she finding Ella's missing "sparkly party shoe" upstairs and dropping it to his waiting hand in the foyer. Two Harlem Globetrotters upping the other's game.

Steph kept peeking at her cell. Discreetly—Ella had friends who spent hours on devices, and Steph refused to set that example. She ducked to the hall during teeth brushing and texted again.

Again, nothing.

"Twelve thirty cuts it close," she muttered. "Nike comes at two... I should really be there to meet them."

Doug was snapping Morgan's onesie with one hand, spooning apple/carrot puree with the other. "Lemme handle it, my lunch is wide open. You worry about Nike."

"I should go."

"Come on, babe—you've worked too hard for this. I'll give you the full report. Ten-to-one odds Becks is inventing some big drama in her head."

Steph twisted her purse strap over one knuckle. She knew if she left it to Doug—for whom nothing was difficult, not football or calculus, or parenting around a sixty-hour workweek—he would conclude Becky was blowing things out of proportion regardless of the facts.

It was 7:15. Becky must be awake by now. Steph buckled Ella into her car seat, then dialed Becky on her way to the driver's side.

Straight to voice mail.

She tried reaching Becky throughout the morning without success. What was Becky doing? Was her news so dire it could only be delivered in person? What if Fiske had gotten physical in class, hauled off and hit some troublemaker? Uttered something racial, sexist? Fiske had always been a staunch progressive, but he was seventy-four-years-old.

A large part of Steph wanted to leave Fiske's situation, whatever it was, for later. Concentrate on Nike. Check in with Doug or Becky this afternoon.

Except that Bob Fiske had been more than a teacher. More than inspiring, even. The man had paid the first two years of Steph's tuition at Stanford, refusing to abide her mother's decree that all five children receive identical state-school educations. He had planted himself in their cramped living room and argued that Steph's development must not be retarded, that his money had been placed in a named account and would be wasted unless they accepted it. (Years later, she and Doug would wonder about the veracity of that claim.) It was the sort of extraordinary act he undertook for Winners. "Whatever you need, whenever you need it," he'd pledge. "Anything to help achieve the life you're meant for."

At 12:22, slipping into her coat, she found Chad Nimms at his cubicle.

"Nike is on cruise control," she told him. "I've prepped the conference room, touched base with their people. All you need to do is handle Rich Hauser for an hour."

Chad swallowed. "So, so like if—"

"Just if anything comes up," she said lightly. "It won't. But if it does, you know the material. Look him in the eye."

With that—and trying to ignore Chad's shrinking gaze now—Steph blew out for the parking garage. Traffic was light on Ridge Avenue, and she pulled into the Evanston Township High lot at 12:28. Hunting for a spot, she twice had to reverse out of approaches after nearly ramming a short car's bumper. Driving had never been a strong suit, too automatic, a low priority for her overacheiver's brain. Steph had caused two accidents in this very lot as a student.

At last she found a spot near the bike racks. Her suede boot had scarcely hit asphalt when the adjacent spot opened up. Her husband's ice-blue Mercedes zoomed in surely as if the letters, DOUG REESE: 2006 PROM KING/STARTING QUARTERBACK, were painted underneath.

"Shall we?"

Steph took his arm on the way in, those familiar muscles warm at her side.

The halls were jammed with students hurrying, or not, from lunch to fifth hour. Steph wondered which might be among this year's Winners. You couldn't always tell by looking. Even apart from natural differences from type, Fiske threw plenty of curveballs: the dropout who will go on to invent the router, the guitar-picking pothead with preternatural gifts for essentializing angst. He'd tapped the daughter of a US congressman the same year as a boy whose adoptive parents were incarcerated on meth charges. The list could be as many as ten, as few as two.

Fiske refused to acknowledge the list's existence on school grounds. Near the end of first semester, new Winners received a cardstock notification by mail—Steph still had hers filed away with the diplomas and birth certificates. Cloaked in such secrecy, the list spawned all sorts of rumors. Winners get skeleton keys to the school... Fiske hazes them with LSD... There's a retreat in Canada where everyone plays Scrabble and writes haiku and has orgies...

What if they bumped into Fiske now? Though his classroom was on the opposite side of the school, he commonly stalked the halls—the famed "Fiske foray"—with thumbs tucked through suspenders, head cocked as though counterbalancing an outsized brain. He had been known to cuff bullies or critique a paper over a student's shoulder.

Fiske would be back-thumpingly glad to see them. Ah, the Royals returned! What would they say about Becky's emergency meeting? Should they lie?

Fortunately, they reached the fine arts hall without hearing their former mentor's baritone. The counselor offices were located near Wildkit Theater, where Steph had starred as Helena in Midsummer.

Becky saw them through the door. "Thank you so, so, so, so much for coming!"

Before Steph could ask about the FedEx, Becky—giant chest bouncing like Jell-O—was clutching her and kissing both cheeks. Doug nobly accepted a hug without having his midsection too lewdly mashed by their former classmate's endowments.

"How are you? Steph, so sorry for not returning texts—total nightmare getting to day care but of course you guys know the drill."

Becky had recently adopted twins from Haiti, six-month-old girls. It was known throughout their circle that she wanted a husband to fill out the picture. Doug grinned and asked how the Match.com listings were looking. Becky feigned pushing him back out into the hall, an exchange straight out of high school, but her lawn-mower giggle had none of its old zest.

Now Steph noticed a fourth person in the room.

"Hello," Lydia Brockert said upon being discovered. She gave a short wave.

Lydia Brockert? Lydia had been a sophomore when they were seniors, an excruciatingly shy girl who had swept her class awards but been unable to accept for fear of walking across the auditorium stage. Steph had heard she was a psych professor at UChicago now, specializing in anxiety research of some kind.

Steph faced Becky. "Alright, Becks, what's going on? That FedEx really scared me."

Becky urged her to sit, pulling plastic chairs off a stack. "Let's wait a sec. I am expecting one more Winner, supposedly he was getting in by early aftern—"

"Sorry I'm late, all," a familiar voice called from the door. "O'Hare has the kludgiest gate layout in the history of gate layouts. Seriously—I was looking for baggage claim and I swear I almost boarded an Air Bahrain nonstop."

Following the voice inside came a wiry man with quick, intense eyes and dark hair spotted with early gray. He dropped garment and laptop bags in a corner.

"Oh my God, Eric!" Steph rushed into another hug. "I had no idea you were coming!"

The former debate partners stood back from each other. Ten years after graduation, the difference in social caste remained clear as ever. Eric Pinkersby might be wearing Bvlgari glasses and hipster jeans, but the fundamentals were unchanged. Steph taller by an inch, looking upon him with the clear-complected beneficence of the lone popular girl in honors class. Eric shifting between insteps, hands comfortable in none of his pockets.

"Aren't you in San Francisco?" she asked.

"The vast majority of days, yes."

Steph smiled but thought it strange that Eric, who, unless something had changed, was on the verge of a lucrative IPO for the high-tech data recovery firm he had founded, would fly cross-country based on Becky's FedEx.

As usual Eric, attuned to every nuance of her face, seemed to read her thoughts. "What's two thousand miles when your sensei needs you? Besides, it's been too long since I've seen Doug Reece. Guy must be bench-pressing sedans by now."

Doug took the smaller man's hand in a crunching grip. "Nice thick layer of callouses, Pinkersby. Good to see you haven't lost your touch with the ladies."

Again, the fundamentals unchanged.

Now Becky pulled her office door closed.

"I know all you smarties lead busy lives, so I'll get to the point. As the letter mentioned—and sorry for the FedEx, it seemed way too important for a text—but anyways yes, this is about Mr. Fiske. Coach Fiske." Nodding Doug's way. "As everyone knows, he has been a polarizing figure. We all loved him, but some of our classmates did not, and it's the same today. Personally, I find him inspiring. Even though I'm no Winner and Mr. Fiske has indeed challenged me at times, I feel he is a huge positive for the school."

She went on several minutes, describing in soap-operatic terms Fiske's relationship with the Brown University English Department—each year he finagled a spot for an ETHS senior—and courageous support for the Student Bill of Rights.

Steph's phone buzzed. A text from Chad: Nike was early. what should i do???

She swiped back, give them a tour, you got this!, then refocused on Becky. She would've liked to speed things along but did not want to embarrass her old classmate, whose inferiority complex always peaked around Winners.

Doug had no such qualms.

"Becks," he interrupted. "Enough preamble. What's up with Fiske?"

"Oh right." Becky thumped herself in the head, setting her blonde curls bouncing. "Just, like, throw a stapler at me when I get off on a tangent—you guys are the ones with brains."

She took a tall breath, and Steph was sure her friend—well, more acquaintance at his point—would launch into further self-deprecation, dismissing the vocation of counselor or apologizing for her low SATs.

Instead, Becky Brindle gripped the beige table they all sat around and changed everything.

"Fiske disappeared on Wednesday."