save, Headmaster!” as Harmon hands Paola a napkin and makes a joke about his mad catcher skills being wasted in a desk job. As if he can feel me watching, he looks up and meets my gaze. There’s something naked and surprised on his face. Then he turns away and saunters out the French doors onto the terrace.
I see Rudy step next to Paola and Kevin Bantree heading across the room to them, but I am already following Harmon, replaying the scene in my head and telling myself I’m wrong. Paola’s high-strung. And clumsy. Remember when she bumped into you and dropped all those flyers—
Remember how she clutched them to her chest like an open wound and wouldn’t make eye contact with you?
Remember all the hours Harmon spent tutoring her, the two of them closeted together in Harmon’s study with the door closed?
No, I tell myself, you wouldn’t believe it of him and Lila. Why would you believe it of him and Paola?
Because Paola is vulnerable—a scholarship girl out of her depth, terrified of failing and disappointing her parents, dependent on the goodwill and financial assistance of men like Harmon.
I catch up with Harmon in the clearing beyond the terrace. “It’s such a lovely night,” he says. “I thought I’d get some air. Care to join me? If we hurry we’ll catch the last light on the Point.”
He ushers me onto the path that cuts straight down the peninsula. It’s too narrow to walk side by side so he walks behind me, his breath on my bare neck. I shiver and he drapes his tuxedo jacket over my shoulders. Ever-solicitous, gentle Harmon. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. I have just imagined what I thought I saw, which was nothing, because there was nothing to see.
When we reach the Point I see that he was right about the light—it catches the lichen on Maiden Island and turns it a fiery orange, like a floating island in a fairy tale. The view is serene and beautiful, nothing like the fog-and-ghost-ridden island of my nightmares. That’s all my suspicions are—a nightmare vestige of the trauma I’ve been through. I turn to face Harmon, ready to make a joke of my suspicions. “You know when I saw you with Paola back there . . .” I begin.
And then I see it on his face. A wince, as if I’d said something in bad taste. “I worry about her,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s unfair to take a girl like that out of her community and give her just enough education to make her dissatisfied with where she came from. I wonder if she’ll ever truly belong anywhere.”
“She looked so nervous when you touched her arm,” I say. Weakly. Plaintively. I want him to convince me that I didn’t see what I saw. (I did see something.)
And he seems ready to oblige. “We had a little . . . misunderstanding,” he says smoothly, his equilibrium recovered. In control. “That’s all. Girls like Paola, they don’t really get all the social cues. We’ve spent a lot of time together this semester because I was tutoring her—remember, you asked me to tutor her—and I’m afraid she might have misread my attention to her as something other than what it was.”
“You mean she thought you were interested in her . . .” I falter, feeling stupid, like I’m the one who has misread the social cues. “. . . sexually?”
He makes a face. “I think it was more of a romantic fantasy on her part. A schoolgirl crush. You know how girls are at that age.”
Teenage girls have big imaginations, as Luther said.
“I think she’s embarrassed,” Harmon continues, as I scramble to make sense of what I’m hearing. “She made a bit of a”—he smiles sheepishly—“profession of her feelings to me and of course I told her it was completely inappropriate. I tried to be gentle but she still got upset. There were tears . . .” He shudders. “You know I’m hopeless when you women cry.” He steps closer and puts his hands on the lapels of his jacket to pull it closer around my shoulders, then rubs his hands up and down my arms to warm me up. “Please don’t let this upset you, Tess, not after all we’ve been through. I really think things are going to be better for us when Rudy goes to college in the fall. And now that I’m headmaster we’ll work together to make this a school that Lila