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The Shared School On the morning Tessa Reid started at South Reach Distribution, Erin Keane spent eleven minutes looking for a child's shoe inside a house too small to lose it. It was a black school shoe, size eleven, with a strip of silver tape over the toe where the leather had split. Lucy had put it somewhere safe. This was the most she could tell them. The other shoe stood alone beside the back door, as though waiting for news. Adam searched the laundry while Erin tipped a basket of plastic animals onto the lounge rug. Lucy watched from the bottom stair with the particular expression she wore when she was trying to be helpful without surrendering any information. “Was the safe place a drawer?” Erin asked. She was still holding the plastic stegosaurus, which she had begun to suspect was unrelated to the missing shoe. Lucy shook her head. Erin tried again: had she put the shoe inside anything? Lucy thought for a moment before saying yes, as though the answer might depend on how strictly the question was interpreted. Adam appeared holding a washing basket, a single red sock draped over his shoulder. He had been up since six to check a temperature alarm at the packing plant, though he wasn't due on site until eight. His hair was still flattened on one side from the pillow. He looked at the schoolbag by the radiator, set down the basket and opened the front compartment. The shoe was inside, its silver-taped toe pointing upwards. “It's a pocket,” Lucy explained. Adam showed Erin the shoe and waited for congratulations that neither of them had time to provide. They were late anyway. Erin found the other sock, Adam knelt to do the laces and Lucy announced that the cheese sandwich packed for lunch was no longer something she liked. They had lived in this house for nearly seven years, and every weekday still seemed to catch them by surprise. Outside, a low grey sky pressed against the roofs of Morrow Bay. The town sat between a stretch of shingle coast and the foothills, far enough from Christchurch to make a specialist appointment an expedition, close enough that people still called it a convenient place to live. In May the mornings were damp, the windows took an age to clear, and the hills appeared and disappeared according to the weather. Erin worked at a regional distribution company whose trucks carried chilled food, hardware and things no one wanted to think about running out of. Adam kept machinery working at a local food-processing site. Their hours overlapped badly enough that each kept a calendar on their phone and neither quite trusted the other's version of it. “Can you do pickup?” Erin asked as Adam put Lucy's lunchbox back in the bag. “Unless the motor gives up again.” “You said it was sorted.” “I said I knew what was wrong with it. Different thing.” He saw her face and smiled. “I'll do pickup. If I'm held up, I'll call before three. Promise.” She kissed him, kissed Lucy, and ran through the rain to the car. At work, the first thing Erin discovered was that someone had booked the small meeting room for a sales call during the new starter's induction. The second was that the person who'd booked it was the managing director. She found another room, moved the projector herself, and answered three questions about a roster she did not administer before Tessa arrived. Tessa was in her late thirties, shorter than Erin had expected from the video interview, with a dark green raincoat and a canvas bag full of notebooks. She had been hired to coordinate regional orders, a job that required good judgement when trucks were late and a degree of patience with people who believed their order should always take priority. Erin had liked her in the interview because she admitted what she didn't know without making a performance of it. The morning went as these mornings usually did: payroll forms, a tour of the dispatch office, a discussion about the refrigeration doors that had not been closing properly, and a hurried introduction to colleagues whose names Tessa was unlikely to remember by lunchtime. Erin explained the handover process twice. Tessa listened the second time as closely as the first. At eleven they reached the kitchen, where the coffee machine was making a noise like a small engine refusing to start. Tessa took tea instead. Erin reached for a mug with a chipped handle and asked where she had been living before the move. “Christchurch, mainly,” Tessa said. She had pulled the tea bag out with a spoon and was trying to find somewhere to put it. “Papanui when I was young, then out east for a bit. Mum stayed there years after I moved out.” Erin held out the saucer from beneath her own mug. “My partner went to Papanui High. I don't suppose you did?” “I did, actually.” Tessa dropped the tea bag onto the saucer. “Small country. What years was he there?” Erin had to think. Adam talked about the school in scraps, usually when something Lucy did reminded him of it. There had been a chemistry teacher who wore cycling shorts to work, a school trip that never reached its destination because the bus broke down, and a terrifying public-speaking competition. She had never needed to assemble these stories into dates. “He finished in 2003, I think. Adam Ward.” Tessa looked up at the ceiling for a moment, doing the arithmetic. “I was still there then. I started in 2001. Don't recognise the name, though. Was he one of the quiet ones?” “Probably. Were you?” “God, no. I was the one who had to be asked to leave the front.” She pushed the wet tea bag farther from her sleeve. “I hated assemblies. Loved the library, though, especially that old reading room with the big windows. You could sit there for hours when it was raining.” Erin said she'd ask Adam whether he remembered it. Another colleague came in wanting help with a delivery discrepancy and Tessa stood aside to let him reach the kettle. By the time Erin had dealt with his question, they were talking about the afternoon handover. By twelve Erin had forgotten to ask Tessa anything else about school. A driver had queried the change to his shift; the operations manager wanted a recruitment advert rewritten in a way that made the job sound less like the job; and somebody had put a carton of frozen prawns in the staff fridge. None of it had anything to do with Adam. Once, while checking the afternoon's interviews, she noticed the word Papanui in a note she'd written beside her keyboard. She'd put it there to remember to tell him. She drew a circle around it and went back to work. * * * Adam had collected Lucy, as promised. He had also bought onions, which meant he had remembered the shopping list only after walking through the vegetable aisle and recognising the absence of onions from their lives. When Erin got home he was standing at the cooker in an old grey sweatshirt, stirring something thick and red in a pan. Lucy had arranged three dolls at the table. The smallest sat in Erin's chair. “I'm having a difficult meeting,” Lucy said, shifting the smallest doll into Erin's chair. “There's been a problem with the biscuits.” Erin hung up her coat. “Any casualties?” she asked. Lucy said nobody was hurt but the biscuits were missing, and she couldn't start another meeting until she'd found out who had taken them. Erin wished her luck and followed the smell of onions to the cooker. Adam tipped a little sauce onto a spoon and blew on it. “How was your new person?” “Competent. A refreshing change. She asks sensible questions and hasn't described herself as a people person once.” “Hire her twice,” Adam said. He moved the pan off the heat while Lucy announced that the tall doll had been seen near the biscuit tin. “We've already hired her once. That's usually enough.” Erin tried the sauce. It needed salt, and Adam passed her the cellar without asking. After eight years together they'd developed an understanding about cooking that was both affectionate and faintly adversarial: he produced it; she told the truth. “Oh, she went to your school,” Erin said, reaching past him for the plates. “Papanui High. Tessa Reid. She started in 2001, so you'd have overlapped.” Adam turned down the heat. “Reid,” he said, then tried the name again under his breath. “No, doesn't mean anything. How did that come up?” “We were making tea. People do talk about things other than regional orders, you know.” She set the plates on the bench. “I told her you finished in 2003.” He glanced at her. “Two thousand and three. God, that sounds a long time ago.” “Well, it was.” Erin began serving Lucy's portion before the sauce could get everywhere. “I wouldn't expect you to remember every student. She didn't remember you either.” “Depends how famous she was.” He took the plate from her and balanced it on one palm. “I wasn't terribly famous myself.” Lucy interrupted to announce that one of the dolls had been dismissed. Erin found her kneeling behind the chair, advising the doll to apologise to the biscuits. Adam went to fetch plates. The conversation appeared to have finished. They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room still held the folding drying rack and two boxes left over from rearranging the spare room. Lucy couldn't see why a person could be sent home from a meeting but not from school. Erin tried to distinguish employment from education without introducing the law into a discussion with a five-year-old. Adam suggested that Lucy's dolls might benefit from a written warning. “I've got a pencil,” Lucy said. “Of course you have,” Adam replied. After dinner there was a reading book about a dog that found a boat, followed by the argument about whether having a shower counted as getting ready for bed if you were already clean. Erin stood in the bathroom doorway while Adam negotiated. He wasn't the patient one in any universal sense. A blocked pipe could reduce him to language he wouldn't use in front of Lucy. But when Lucy was tired and frightened of being hurried, he slowed everything down. He talked her through the steps as if no other evening had ever mattered. Erin leaned against the frame and watched them. It was the sort of sight she rarely thought to remember: Adam kneeling by the bath with a towel over his shoulder, Lucy insisting that her hair wasn't wet despite visible evidence to the contrary. Later, after the light had gone out in Lucy's room, Erin found Adam loading the dishwasher. He was still turning something over in his mind. She recognised it from the way he kept the same plate in his hands. “What was her name again?” Adam asked. He was loading the dishwasher, although he'd been holding the same plate for long enough that Erin had begun to wonder whether he was deciding where it belonged. “Tessa Reid.” “No, don't know it.” He put the plate into the rack. “Did she say where she used to spend her time?” “The library, mostly. She mentioned an old reading room with big windows.” He kept his hand on the open dishwasher door. “I remember one room, long and a bit gloomy. The windows were high up near the ceiling. You couldn't see outside unless you stood on a chair.” “Maybe they changed it,” Erin said. “She started in 2001. You might be thinking of how it was before that.” Adam eased the door shut, found it hadn't latched and opened it again. “Or she's thinking of a room off the library. Schools get rebuilt. I couldn't even tell you which classrooms were on which side of the corridor now.” Erin picked up Lucy's cup and rinsed the dried milk from its rim. She'd thought the coincidence would amuse him, but he was treating the difference as something he was meant to settle. “I wasn't trying to catch you out.” “I know you weren't.” He turned the cup upside down in the rack. “It just sounds odd when you say we were there at the same time. Ask if she remembers the mural in the foyer.” “What mural?” “Huge map with a river running through it. Everybody complained that the mountains were in the wrong place. I was once kept back for telling someone they'd moved Canterbury.” He was smiling by the time he finished. “It wasn't my finest moment.” “You've never told me about that.” “It's a painting in a school foyer, Erin. I've spared you entire afternoons of my life that were less interesting.” She could picture him at seventeen, lankier than he was now, standing before a painted map and offering an opinion he hadn't been asked for. As with most of his school stories, the picture in her mind had come entirely from Adam; she'd never seen a photograph of the place. “I'll ask her,” Erin said. “But if she doesn't remember it, I don't think that makes either of you wrong.” “It means I'm owed twenty dollars for being the more interesting former pupil.” “By me?” “Who else?” He caught her wrist when she passed and kissed the inside of it, a familiar small interruption that left her standing by the dishwasher longer than she intended. They sat together on the sofa and watched half an episode of a programme neither had chosen. Adam fell asleep before the end, one hand resting on her knee. Erin woke him when she went upstairs. He apologised for leaving the kitchen light on, although she'd been the last to go through it. It would have been easy to leave the school conversation there. The difference between a bright room and a dark one was hardly evidence of anything. Erin herself had once sworn that her grandmother's house had a blue front door, only to see an old photograph proving it had always been white. Memory protected its own version of events. That was one of the reasons she preferred written records at work, even when people found them tedious. But she thought of Adam holding the plate, of how long he'd taken to put it down. It wasn't the library he had wanted to get right. It was the question of whether he'd got it right. * * * Erin went downstairs for water just after ten. The kitchen smelt faintly of onions and dishwasher detergent. Lucy's drawing of three stick figures, a grey cat they didn't own and a large yellow sun was held to the fridge with a magnet from a petrol station near Timaru. She opened her phone to set a reminder to ask Tessa about the mural, then stopped. There was no reason to involve a new employee in a domestic puzzle that meant nothing. Tessa had been hired because she could coordinate the company's regional orders, not to provide evidence about a stranger's schooldays. Erin had access to onboarding information in the ordinary course of her work, but she'd spent enough years explaining confidentiality to other people to know that curiosity wasn't a reason to revisit it. She typed the name of the school into a browser instead. The website came up immediately. Papanui High School, Christchurch. School notices, photographs of students she didn't know, information about enrolment and courses. A real school with a real history, going back decades. Of course it was. She'd never doubted that. She opened the history page and scrolled through an account of the school's beginnings. Nothing there told her whether Adam had attended, still less what sort of room he'd used for reading. There were photographs from different periods, but no useful view of the foyer he had described. Some images weren't dated in the way she needed. One link took her to a page that no longer existed. She looked for a public school magazine or an old newsletter. A later article mentioned improvements to the buildings; another referred to an anniversary event. The dates jumped about, and she couldn't tell whether the photographs had been taken at the events they illustrated or added afterwards. If she searched long enough she could probably find a hundred stories about buildings that had been knocked down or repainted. It wouldn't prove which room either person remembered. She was about to close the page when she found herself looking again at the note she'd written at work: Papanui. Tessa, 2001. Adam, 2003. Two people could easily spend three years at the same school without meeting. They could remember different rooms, or different versions of the same one. She still had no way of knowing which was the case. Beneath tomorrow's shopping list she wrote: Was the reading room moved? When? She added a second note to look for an old plan or a properly dated photograph; the pictures on the school website weren't enough to settle it. She couldn't answer any of it by asking Adam to remember harder, and she wasn't going to make Tessa spend her second day at work explaining her childhood. An old school plan or a contemporary magazine might do the job. She would look when she had time. The washing machine was still full. Erin moved Lucy's wet uniform to the drying rack, rinsed the saucepan Adam had left soaking and put out three breakfast bowls. Upstairs, Adam was asleep with one arm across her side of the duvet. She moved it gently aside, climbed into bed and lay awake only long enough to remember she'd forgotten to buy bread.