You remember the way her hand fit into yours, small and certain, a map of warmth you trusted without thinking. When you were little, Miss Grace arrived like a small constellation—impossible to ignore. Her visits were not visits but whole days: you baked cookies until the kitchen smelled of sugar and burnt edges, you sprawled on the sofa and watched cartoons until the credits blurred, you chased each other across the yard with the kind of reckless patience that left you sticky and breathless. She called you "dumpling" then, soft as a secret, and you clung to the nickname like a life preserver.

One day your mother didn't come home. The next the hospital hummed around you in a language you didn't know—polished tile, the antiseptic sting at the back of your throat, doctors who spoke in careful parentheses. Your mother's illness came like a slow undoing. You learned what waiting was meant to feel like. You learned how to press your forehead to cool glass and hope it would hold you.

Your mother's last request was a small sentence with a weight like a promise: please, take care of them. Miss Grace promised. You believed her the way children believe in anchors. For a while it was true—she was guardian and guardian's patience wrapped into one. But grief is a peculiar map; it redraws boundaries without asking permission. After your mother died, Grace pulled back as if she were trying to keep the edges sharp, to make a clean cut between past and present. At first it was small things: she stopped bringing cookies, stopped staying until evening. Later she retreated farther—visits thinned, phone calls evaporated, the space where her presence used to be filled by a polite distance and then silence. A year after your mother's funeral she was gone from your life altogether.

Years passed. You grew into a person that could walk without staggering from the weight of memory, or at least you learned to hide the stagger. Two years ago you enrolled at the Fundamental Paper Education (F.P.E.). You found, to your thin astonishment, that Miss Grace was the principal. The first time you saw her in the school's corridors it felt like colliding with a photograph of your childhood; the figure was the same and not the same.

You did not reconnect. You had both agreed—without saying it—that some things were easier when clipped. Conversations reduced themselves to necessary syllables: a reprimand when you were sent to the office, an assessment of grades, a curt instruction.

Today the halls smell of bleach and rain; fluorescent lights hum like distant bees. At the far end of the corridor a door opens and a shape fills it—Miss Grace, stepping into the light with a stack of papers clutched against her chest. They look official, the kind of forms that could be filed and indexed and hidden in a room behind a locked door: the missing students. The dead children. Although it wasn't a big surprise to you. You already knew beforehand that the school teachers were sadistic, bloodthirsty cannibals, or at least three of them were.

She stands there, shoulders slightly hollowed, she does not seem to be reading, and murmurs under her breath as if talking to a ghost rather than to the paper. "These days are getting more and more stressful…" Her voice is quieter than you remember—ghost-quiet—threaded with something like fatigue and a softness you didn't think she still owned. For a moment, time contracts, and the hall narrows to the distance between you.

She turns.

It is the smallest movement: the tilt of her chin, the shift of the paper in her hand—but it carries the force of everything you have not been able to say. Her eyes meet yours, or rather they meet the place where your eyes used to find hers when you were a child.

The corridor hums on. Outside, rain begins to patter against windows you cannot see from here, and for a breath you both stand in the same puddle of light, neither crossing, neither turning away.