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question. It was a verbal tic I couldn’t seem to master.
    He looked up at the ceiling with a little scholarly squint.
    “I haven’t worked with him,” he said after a moment.
    This was hopeful news. Langdon generally worked one-on-one with the most difficult cases, the callous-unemotional kids, a term they used a lot at Fieldcrest. These children—who display a total lack of empathy, disregard for others, and a severely deficient affect—are those whom certain experts now believe will evolve into psychopaths. But a 2008 review of this diagnosis found that there was not sufficient evidence for it to be included in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Even so, most child psychiatrists recognized these early warning signs of very bad things to come. Of course, the mind is a mysterious thing and the mind of a child even more mysterious still. So everyone in the field was pretty careful about what kind of diagnoses they threw around. Some children grow out of their disorders, rather than grow in. (I was living proof of that. Sort of.) If Langdon wasn’t working with Luke, maybe Luke wasn’t that bad.
    I told him about the interview, the unpacking, the pleasant dinner that had followed with all of us chattering and laughing as if we’d known each other forever. It was actually a little strange. Ithad stayed with me, the feeling that I had known Rachel and Luke for a very long time. I was more comfortable at their table on our first night of knowing each other than I had ever been with my own family.
    “Well, good,” he said. “It sounds like you’re all going to get something out of this. I’ll ask around about him.”
    I almost said, Don’t! I don’t even know why, maybe I didn’t want anything to break the charm. Instead I said, “How did you know?” Because it had been he who found the ad and insisted that I call.
    “Just a feeling,” he said. He flashed that funny smile he had, and I felt a familiar flutter in my belly, which I immediately quashed. In our closest moments, I had this sense that he’d always been around to advise me and listen to my problems. And I hoped he always would be, in one way or another. But I refused to be the cliché. I was not and would never be the student who had a hopeless crush on a professor.
    The rest of the students started to file in, and Langdon turned back to his notes. It was the first day of my final class with him, abnormal psychology. Of course, I already knew more about the subject than I wanted.
    You see, I am a person with secrets. And I guard them carefully, keep them locked in a box inside myself. I rarely opened the lid of my psyche to look inside. Almost no one, except the doctor I saw in town, knew the truth about who I was, or my history. There was very little I wouldn’t have done to keep it that way. Shame was a thick cloak that I wrapped around myself and hid beneath. It was dark and lonely, but at least it was safe.
    I opened my notebook as Langdon took the podium.
    “Where is the line between normal and abnormal? At best, it is faint and nebulous, isn’t it? We’ve talked in your earlier classesabout the difficulty of drawing that line in some cases, about the various criteria used to make diagnoses in our field and design appropriate and effective treatment. In this class, we’ll discuss the types of cases that are undeniably over the line into abnormal. Over the last decade, new research in the areas of genetics and neuroscience has us thinking about mental illness in an entirely new way. How much of it is environment, how much biology? How much the union of those two things? And what other elements contribute? What, if any, power do we have in the most extreme cases to be of service?”
    He went on and on in the dim room, and I bowed my head dutifully scribbling notes, wondering if he had anything to teach me about mental illness that I didn’t already know.

    I found the keys in the planter, just as Rachel had promised,