She’d been in the classroom seventeen years now, the last sixteen at Memorial High, a Catholic school in east Oakland, not far from San Leandro. She’d recently been promoted to head of the English department, which would look great on a résumé, but wasn’t much of an honor if you knew there were only three English teachers at Memorial. “What do you think about them using a surrogate?”

“I don’t have a problem with it,” Meg said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“I don’t think anyone in the family does. I wish they’d look into it. It’s expensive, but Cass and Tommy already have the frozen embryos.”

Remembering her conversation with Dad, Kit rubbed at her brow, easing the tension headache. “I just can’t see Tommy ever agreeing to it. I don’t know if it’s a control thing, or a society thing, but Tommy’s against taking any more extreme measures to make a baby.”

“Adopting isn’t extreme. I’d adopt, if I couldn’t have kids.”

“I would, too. Let’s just hope Cass can convince Tommy to reconsider all their options.”

Monday was Kit’s least favorite day of the week. It was hard to rally Monday morning after a weekend away from school. She knew her students felt the same way, and so she made a point of making each Monday morning’s lessons interesting, trying to hook her students’ attention quickly, painlessly. Or as painlessly as possible considering that most of her students were sleep deprived and school started early.

Fortunately, as the head of her very small department, Kit was able to pick the classes she wanted to teach and she chose to teach everything—from basic freshman English to the very advanced AP British lit. It meant she had six different preps, but she liked it that way, as the varied curriculum held her interest and allowed her to teach far more novels, poetry, and plays every year than she’d be able to teach otherwise.

Kit loved books. Reading was her thing. But being a teacher wasn’t just about sharing great books with young, bright minds. It was also about managing, controlling, organizing, disciplining, advising, as well as assuming extra duties to keep the school’s overhead down. At Memorial, the faculty all had duties outside their classroom. Yard duty, cafeteria duty, extracurricular jobs, adviser jobs, coaching positions. Teachers wore many hats. Kit was spending her lunch hour in her classroom wearing her Drama Club adviser hat now.

Kit had founded the Drama Club her first year at Memorial High, and for the past fifteen years it’d been one of the school’s most prestigious clubs, putting on wonderful, if not extravagant and exhausting, productions every spring.

But this year she was beginning to think there wouldn’t be a production. The club was small, with less than a dozen students. Her die-hard thespians, the most talented kids she’d probably ever worked with, had graduated in June, and she—and the club—missed those nine kids. The seven students who’d remained in the club had managed to recruit only one new freshman, and the eight club members couldn’t agree on anything.

“You’re running out of time,” Kit said from her desk, raising her voice to be heard over the rustle of paper bags and crumpling plastic and conversation taking place at the student desks. “You don’t meet again until next month, and then it’s auditions. So you really need to discuss what kind of production interests you and get some consensus. If you can’t agree, then I think it’s time you accepted that there won’t be a spring show.”

“What kind of show can we do again?” one of the sophomore girls asked.

Irritation beat at Kit. She hadn’t slept well last night, had woken late, and had dashed to school without breakfast and was starving right now. Her gaze fell on her sandwich. It was looking bruised inside its plastic baggie but it made her mouth water.