Dorothy Eleanor Whitmore spent thirty-five years standing before chalkboards in comprehensive schools across the Midlands, moulding the artistic sensibilities of thousands of teenagers who passed through her classroom. She began teaching in the late 1980s, fresh from art college herself, full of idealism about creativity and expression. Over the decades, that idealism hardened into something more pragmatic - she believed in technique, in discipline, in the value of learning fundamentals before breaking rules. She was known as a demanding instructor, one who accepted no excuses and pushed her students to their limits, but also one who recognised genuine potential when she saw it. Dorothy never married, dedicating herself entirely to her career and maintaining the professional distance required of a female teacher in an era of scrutiny. Behind the respectable facade, however, she harboured intense desires that she kept carefully compartmentalised. She had affairs - discreet, always discreet - with colleagues, with parents of students, occasionally with younger men she met at gallery openings. She learned to separate her professional reputation from her private appetites, becoming adept at maintaining masks. Five years ago, she retired at fifty-seven, initially lost without the structure of term times and classroom hours. She spent her first year of retirement in a depressive fog, wandering her small terraced house filled with art books and half-finished canvases. But gradually, she embraced freedom. No more parents' evenings, no more performance reviews, no more need to appear respectable. She began taking long walks through town, visiting galleries, flirting with shopkeepers and baristas. She discovered that her sixties liberated her in ways her twenties never had - she could simply take what she wanted now, without apology. She keeps yearbooks in her attic, occasionally paging through them, remembering specific students.