And then, before I had even turned back to Kent Buckley, I heard him announce to the room the name of Max’s replacement.

“The new principal of the Kempner School will be … a rising star in the world of independent administration … a guy we were unbelievably lucky to get at this late date on such short notice…” Kent Buckley paused as if we were all having fun. As if a drumroll might magically come out of nowhere. Then he said, “Duncan Carpenter.”

I don’t know if Kent Buckley was expecting cheers or clapping or what. But there was just silence. That name was just a name. It didn’t mean anything to anybody.

Anybody except me.

I knew that name.

At the sound of it, I stood straight up in the middle of the room.

Just popped right up.

Just … burst upward, like a reflex. Like a leg at the doctor’s office.

But then, unlike a leg, I stayed up—my brain frozen.

Everybody stared at me. Including Kent Buckley, who was not exactly pleased.

There was no universe where Kent Buckley would have been a fan of mine, given that I was his wife’s nemesis. But he really, especially detested me ever since the time he’d overheard me calling him a “douchebag” at a school function.

In my defense, he was a douchebag, and I bet you nine out of every ten people would pick that exact word. But I guarantee you none of them would say it to his face.

Not even me.

Kent Buckley wanted me to sit back down. That much was clear.

But I couldn’t.

The name he’d just spoken was holding me suspended in shock.

“I’m sorry.” I shook my head, as if to clear it. “Did you just announce Max’s replacement … and tell us that it would be … that it would be…”

I paused at the impossibility of it.

Kent Buckley had zero time for this. “Duncan Carpenter,” he repeated, like he was talking to a dumb kid.

So many questions. I didn’t know where to start. “Do you mean the Duncan Carpenter?”

Kent Buckley frowned. “Is there more than one?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

The whole room was watching. Was this a conversation that needed to happen right now?

Um, yes.

“Tall and lanky?” I asked Kent Buckley then, lifting my hand way above my head. “Sandy hair? Super goofy?”

Kent Buckley’s voice was clipped. “No. Not ‘super goofy.’”

Maybe we had different definitions of that phrase. I tried to clarify. “Like, wearing crazy golf pants?” I went on. “Or a tie with rubber duckies on it?”

I was on borrowed time. “Just a normal suit,” Kent Buckley said.

I paused. A normal suit. Huh.

The whole room could tell I was having a moment. I don’t know a word, or even a category, for what I felt at the sound of that name, but it was more like a cocktail of emotions than any simple substance. Equal parts horror and ecstasy, with a twist of panic, and a little zest of disbelief—all poured over the cold ice of comprehension about what Kent Buckley’s announcement meant for my immediate future.

It wasn’t good.

The clock was ticking on everybody’s patience—Kent Buckley’s the most. Before I could ask another question, he pointed decisively at my seat, like We’re done here.

I sat. More out of stupefaction than obedience. Then I stayed still, trying to will the adrenaline out of my system.

Could there be more than one Duncan Carpenter in the world? I guessed it was possible. The world was a big place. But … more than one Duncan Carpenter in the world of independent elementary education?

Less likely.

The reality of the odds hit me.

Duncan Carpenter was coming here. To my sleepy little town on Galveston Island. To replace my beloved principal and run my beloved school.

The Duncan Carpenter.

“He’s a stellar candidate,” Kent Buckley continued to the room at last, glad to have his rightful stage back. “An assistant principal that took a nightmare of a school and pulled it together in the course of one year. They counteroffered several times to keep him, but he needed a change of location for personal reasons, and he’s ours now. He’s going to get in here and shake things up. Give this place the kick in the pants it’s needed for so long.”

Did our sweet little utopia of a school need a kick in the pants?

No. Not at all.

Of course, we would need somebody to be in charge. But why wasn’t it Babette? I guarantee every single teacher in that room would have voted for Babette.

But this was Kent Buckley. He wasn’t asking us to vote.

As far as he was concerned, his vote was the only vote that mattered.

Are you wondering how it’s possible that Kent Buckley was the chairman of the board even though absolutely nobody liked him? Because, seriously: nobody liked him. Nobody liked his scheming, or his striving, or his ill-informed opinions on “what you people need.”

But when I say nobody, I really mean the faculty and the staff.

Let’s just say, we weren’t charmed by his BMW.

He campaigned hard to get voted chairman, and while Max was alive, it wasn’t that much of a job. Max made all the decisions, anyway—and this school was as much a cult of personality as anything else.

Max had known that Kent Buckley’s values were not in line with the school’s. But he just wasn’t too worried about it. “Just let him be the chairman. He wants it so bad.”

So they let him be the chairman. And then, less than a year later, Max died on us. And now Kent Buckley, of all people—a guy who had never liked Max, or the school, and who only sent his kid here because it was the one thing his wife had ever insisted on in their entire marriage—was suddenly in charge.

What. The. Hell.

And his first decision was to hire Duncan Carpenter as our new principal.

Which was … unexpected.

I would have expected Kent Buckley to hire somebody weaselly and petty, like himself. But he’d hired Duncan Carpenter. Duncan Carpenter. Probably the most Max-like person I’d ever met … besides Max himself.

It had to have been a mistake somehow.

* * *

In the wake of his announcement, Kent Buckley got some IT guys to project a photo of Duncan Carpenter up on a screen for us all to see. At first, I felt a buzz of relief.

For a half-second, I thought: Never mind.

The Duncan Carpenter I’d known had a lopsided smile, and perpetually mussed-up, shaggy hair—and he did something crazy in his official school portrait every year: deely boppers, or a fake punk-rock mohawk, or a giant stick-on mustache. The Duncan Carpenter I’d known had never taken a serious photo in his life. He had an irrepressible streak of joyful, anti-authoritarian naughtiness that he brought to every photo.

Not this guy.

No way was this guy Duncan Carpenter.

This guy had perfectly trimmed hair, styled up in front in a neat, businessman’s coif. And a gray suit with a navy tie. And he was just … sitting there. He wasn’t even smiling.

The guy in this photo was a stiff.

But once my eyes adjusted, once I accounted for the missing mop of hair, and the missing Hawaiian-print tie, and the missing mischievous smile, I had to admit … the face was essentially a lot like Duncan Carpenter’s face. Different, somehow—but the same.

His nose. His eyes. And definitely his mouth.

I felt an electric buzz—part agony, part thrill—at the moment of recognition.

It was him, after all. It was Duncan.

I’d thought I’d never see him again, ever. I’d planned to never see him again.

But now there he was.

Sort of. Though he looked so wrong. So unlike himself. He looked like he was in costume. And that was the most likely explanation, actually: that he might really be in costume—that he’d taken a parody photo of a hard-ass administrator, and Kent Buckley, in all his humorlessness, had thought it was real.

Because it couldn’t be real.

“Meet your new principal,” Kent Buckley said then to the room. “He knows a thing or two, that’s for sure. He starts next week, so you’ll have to be ready to hit the ground running when he arrives.”

What was this guy even talking about? We didn’t take orders from him.

Alice raised her hand. “We all thought Babette was going to take over.”

Kent Buckley’s eyes flicked over in Babette’s direction.

Babette was our art teacher at the school. She was the lady responsible for all the painted tiles in the courtyard. And the mosaic stepping-stones. And the painted lanterns. And the friendship quilt that hung in the office. And pretty much every inch of color or whimsy in the place.

But she wasn’t just the art teacher. Max and Babette had been a team of wise and kindly co-parents since the beginning.

“Babette,” Kent Buckley declared, “is grieving. She’s in no state to run a school.”

We all looked over at Babette.

She didn’t argue … but she didn’t agree, either.

For months following that moment, there would be a raging debate among the faculty over why Babette hadn’t been given the job. Most people got the sense that Kent Buckley had snubbed her and withheld her rightful position.