Once again, Susan is struck by a memory: Edmund, coming to her flat for dinner and staying the night because a storm kicked up during pudding. This was in his last year, when he was the only one of the others really making an effort to keep things normal, but before the queer few weeks between him walking in on her and Miriam and his death. They'd have their fights about Narnia, too, but they'd also have days, even weeks of regular interactions between those fights. Unlike Lucy, who wanted to argue Susan back into faith, and Peter, who didn't want to talk to her at all when she was being unreasonable.

Susan's flatmate had gone on to bed, but the two of them curled up on the sofa far later than Susan ought to have been up with work in the morning, talking. He'd been telling her some convoluted story about a book he'd been reading with a dear friend of his. She was tired, and it was hard to follow, especially since he'd been pausing to gather his own thoughts so frequently, and ultimately she'd begged off and kissed his forehead and gone to bed, too. There was always next time, after all. Now, with distance, she wonders if he hadn't been working up to telling her something else about that friend. He'd been at the funeral, that young man, eyes and face red.

Now she looks at Galahad and remembers the look on Edmund's face that night, and the way they'd never finished that conversation.

"We've got time," she says. The tower is still some ways off, and it's large inside.