When I reached Mrs. Kline’s desk, her little reception area was stacked to the ceiling with boxes. She was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.

“It’s all Max’s stuff,” she said, as I took in the sight. “I spent the weekend boxing it up.”

“Oh, Mrs. Kline,” I said, getting a little teary myself. “I bet that was hard.”

“Better me than Babette,” she said, and I had to agree.

I nodded. “I guess he really had a lot of stuff.”

“Thirty years’ll do that.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“I’m just going to have maintenance take it to storage.”

I nodded. Good plan.

Then Mrs. Kline took a slow breath and shifted gears. “Are you here for”—she checked her appointment book—“your ten-thirty meeting?”

I glanced at the wall clock above her head. It was nine forty-seven. “Yes,” I said.

“Would you care to wait?”

“Not really,” I said.

She tilted her head toward Max’s closed office door. “Principal Carpenter said he didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t want to be disturbed, either. None of us wanted to be disturbed.

I looked at the closed door, hesitated for one second total, and then I marched over and knocked on it.

Loudly.

No answer.

I knocked again. Nothing.

But I knew he was in there.

Finally, I just started knocking and didn’t stop. Short, insistent raps: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Like a woodpecker. A loud, you-better-come-open-this-door kind of woodpecker.

Mrs. Kline just watched, her eyes wide with disbelief.

Finally, Duncan yanked the door open, growling: “Mrs. Kline, I said I’m—”

When he saw me, he stopped.

Then he finished with, “Not here.”

He looked a little breathless. Almost a little sweaty—like he’d been … exercising, maybe? His jacket was off, and so was the vest. His tie was off, too, and his collar was open. What was he up to?

“But you clearly are here,” I said, determined not to be fazed.

Mrs. Kline stood up. “Principal Carpenter, this is our librarian, Samantha Casey. Most people call her Sam.”

And then I couldn’t help it. “Unless we’ve all had a few margaritas,” I said to Mrs. Kline, like amiright? “Then it’s more like Saaaam, or Samster, or Sammie.”

What was I doing? I didn’t even drink. I didn’t have any nickname but Sam. But Duncan didn’t know that. Because, as I may have mentioned, he had no idea who I was.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“I’m in the middle of something.”

Clearly. “It’s urgent.”

“I’m unavailable.”

“But I have an appointment.”

Duncan checked Mrs. Kline’s wall clock. “In forty-one minutes.”

He wasn’t wrong. But there was no possible way I could wait for forty-one minutes.

“It really can’t wait,” I said, walking right past him into his office. A very ballsy move that, for a minute at least, made me feel quite I-am-woman-hear-me-roar.

That is, until Duncan—less impressed than I’d have liked—watched me situate myself opposite him in his office, ready to face off. Then he seemed to give a kind of mental oh, well shrug, and then he kneeled down to the floor, leaned forward onto his hands … and started doing push-ups.

For a second, I just watched him. It was so unexpected. And he was kind of mesmerizing, too—straight as a board from his heels to his head, pumping up and down with absolute vigor, like it was easy. Great form.

“What are you doing?” I finally asked.

“I told you I was busy.”

“Isn’t this the kind of thing people usually do at the gym?”

“Some people, I guess. I like to space them out through the day.”

It was so off-putting. It threw me off. “Should I … wait for you to finish?”

“I thought you said it couldn’t wait.”

Fair enough.

Looking back, the fact that I thought I was about to quit really impacted how that moment played out. I wasn’t thinking of myself as Duncan’s employee, or trying to keep my behavior professional, or even worried about my job. I had one foot out the door, anyway.

Besides, this guy had just pulled out a gun at a school. A fake one, but still.

All bets were kind of off.

When this office had been Max’s, it was full of keepsakes. Plants, kid art, and photos had covered every shelf, wall, and surface—including his desk, at least the parts of it that weren’t covered with ever-changing stacks of papers.

The same office—now belonging to Duncan—was the opposite.

Of course, Duncan had just moved in. Most of his things were still in the boxes stacked in the corner. But it wasn’t just that he hadn’t unpacked. He’d changed everything. When facilities had repainted—which the room had needed—Duncan had chosen a cold gray to replace the warm, creamy white from before. The tan carpet had also been replaced with gray. Max’s warm, Stickley-style furniture had been replaced with—you guessed it—cheap, gray office furniture. With a little black for variety.

The paint smell wasn’t helping, either.

I’m not here to debate the merits of tan carpet over gray.

It was just a very different vibe.

“This place…” I said, looking around. “It’s like the Death Star.”

If Duncan heard me, he decided not to engage.

I took in the sight of him, still going strong—down, then up, then down, then up—with the push-ups. No faltering, no variation. Like a piston firing in a factory.

No wonder his shoulders were so much … shoulderier.

“So,” he said, from below me, in the most conversational tone, as if anything about this moment was normal. “What is it that can’t wait forty-one minutes?”

Good question. What was it again?

I was so disoriented, both by what was happening right now and by what had happened at the morning’s meeting, that I couldn’t figure out where to even begin.

My original goal had been to meet with Duncan this morning, tell him it was nice to see him again, give him a few pointers, and then pleasantly quit my job.

But it wasn’t nice to see him again.

It was many things, but definitely not nice. It was highly disturbing. And worrying. And panic-inducing. And so now I was here to—what? Give him a talking-to? Shake him by the shoulders? Find out why he was acting so weird?

And how, exactly, do you follow all that by saying, “Oh, and P.S. I quit”?

But, of course, I wouldn’t be quitting now. Not anymore. I couldn’t. How could I possibly quit now—and leave everybody I loved behind with no one to protect them from this guy?

My half-an-hour-ago goals had all been nullified—but now I wasn’t totally sure what my new ones were.

“We need to talk about that meeting,” I finally said.

Duncan straightened a crease on his sleeve. “What about it?”

“It was … really odd.”

No response. Duncan just kept pumping up and down.

“Is there any way at all you could pause your exercise routine? Doing push-ups while I talk to you is kind of super rude.”

“Barging in here without permission is also super rude.”

“So,” I said, “we’re even.”

Duncan seemed to slow while he thought about that. “Fair enough,” he said, and then he shifted back onto his feet, stood up, and turned toward me, looking … extra tall.

“Okay,” he said, resting his hands on his belt. “Let’s talk.”

But what to say? Where to even begin? I wanted to say, “What the hell was that?” Or, “Who the hell are you?” Or maybe even, “Did you eat the real Duncan and assume his identity?” That’s how weird things were in my head.

In the end, I went with plain old: “What just happened?”

But I really amped up my tone of voice to compensate.

Now that I finally had his attention—now that we were alone, and face to face—I couldn’t help but wonder if, away from the audience and the stage, he might recognize me then. I hoped he might say something like, “Hey—do we know each other?” Or, “Hey—you look a little bit like…?”

But nope. He just said, like he’d say to a total stranger, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And here’s where my ego got in the way of my goals. Because if he didn’t recognize me, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that I recognized him. Which eliminated some of the most insightful things I could have said. “I’m talking about the meeting,” I said.

“What about it?”

“It was a disaster.”

“I disagree.”

“Do you have any idea what this school is dealing with right now? We’ve just lost our principal. Our beloved principal—and founder. Not last year or even last spring. This summer. Everybody in that room was grieving and raw and lost and scared—including, I’ll add, his wife, who was sitting in the back row like a statue.”

“None of that has to do with me,” Duncan said. “I didn’t cause any of that. And I can’t fix it, either.”

“Maybe you can’t fix it. But you can try like hell not to make it worse.”

“People die,” Duncan said then. “It happens all the time. The best we can do is move on. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Nobody is ready to move on.”