Curtain Call at the Lantern

Rook took her arm the way he might have taken his mother's. There were no handcuffs, no drama; just a tall, silver-haired woman in a green coat, walking up the aisle of a theatre she'd sat in for forty years.

At the door she stopped. Her back was straight, but for the first time you saw the effort in it. "He was the best student I ever had," she said, quietly, to nobody in particular. "That's what I can't forgive."

The trial was short. The Sentinel ran the story for a week under the headline THE WOMAN WHO MADE SIR EDWIN. Halloran did his best to make it about class. For once, he wasn't entirely wrong.

Jonah waited until the rain returned before he spoke. "Do you think she was born wanting to be somebody else?"

"I think," you said, "nobody's born wanting anything. I think somebody taught her that the person she was wasn't good enough. And then she spent her life proving it."

You looked up at the dead neon lantern above the theatre doors.

"Structure or action?" said Jonah.

"Both," you said. "Always both."