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NINETEEN

Jillian Alcott, chemistry teacher at London’s prestigious Abbey College, carefully picked her way through the swollen puddles along Notting Hill’s Pembridge Road. Arriving at the Notting Hill Gate Tube station, the five-foot-eight redhead with deep green eyes and high cheekbones politely but firmly shouldered her way through the crowd that had gathered at the entrance to take shelter from the storm. After collapsing her distinctive Burberry umbrella and giving it her customary three firm snaps to rid it of any residual rainwater, she tucked it beneath her left arm and removed her Tube pass from her wallet.

Though Jillian was in fine physical condition and could have easily walked the distance, saving time by cutting through Kensington Gardens, the weather was just too disagreeable for her. Ever since she was a small child, she had never liked thunderstorms.

Jillian was seven years old when her parents left her alone with her grandmother to drive inland to sell some of their livestock. It was a late Friday afternoon, and the weather began to kick up half an hour after her parents had left. She stared out the front windows of their little stone house at the enormous white caps forming on the ever-darkening Celtic Sea. Her grandmother pulled out all of her board games and they played every one of them in an effort to take Jillian’s mind off the storm raging outside. Jillian tried her absolute hardest to be brave, but with each booming knell of thunder the house shook, and she was certain the next would send the tiny structure toppling over the nearby cliffs and into the sea.

Jillian’s grandmother tried everything to calm the little girl, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, she decided to draw Jillian a hot bath and infuse it with lavender.

With the bath drawn, Jillian’s grandmother was just about to put her in when another flash of lightning blazed and all of the power in the house went out. A roaring clap of thunder followed that shook the small dwelling and rattled the windows so hard the glass seemed poised to fall out of its panes.

Jillian’s grandmother left her in the bathroom for just a moment while she went to search for candles, but she never came back.

The little girl used her hand to feel along the wall and guide her toward the kitchen. Floorboards creaked beneath her feet, and every cold brass doorknob she touched along the way sent chills racing up her spine. When she finally made it into the kitchen, she immediately sensed that something was wrong.

She called out softly to her grandmother but received no response. The candles were in a drawer on the far side of the room, but Jillian was afraid to cross the kitchen in the dark. Something inside her told her not to move. She waited and waited until another flash of lightning came, and when it did, she had the shock of her seven-year-old life. Lying on the floor was her gran. Apparently, she had tripped in the dark and in her fall had hit her head on the kitchen table. Upon seeing the pool of blood that was quickly covering the floor, Jillian screamed and ran.

She dashed into the front hall and picked up the telephone to call the police. If there is an emergency, always call the police first, her parents had told her. Jillian picked up the phone, ready to dial the number she had learned by heart, but the phone was dead.

Still in her pajamas, Jillian thought only of her gran. Grabbing her mac from the front closet, she quickly pulled it on, followed by her bright red Wellington-style boots. When she opened the front door, she was greeted by an enormous burst of wind that almost pushed her back inside. The little girl had no choice; she had to get help.

Through the storm, Jillian ran the mile and a half down their muddy road to the junction only to find that it had been washed out. She was trapped. There was no way she could cross the torrent of floodwater. There was no way she could get to the neighbors, or anyone else for that matter. There was no way she could get help. There was nothing she could do but return to the house.

When she did, she realized she would have to tend to her grandmother. Mustering her courage, she reentered the kitchen and found a towel, intending to begin by cleaning the blood from her gran’s head wound. As she approached, though, she realized her grandmother wasn’t moving. There wasn’t even the rhythmic heave and fall of her chest as she took in air. Jillian crept closer and, placing her hand alongside her grandmother’s cold flesh, realized that she was gone.

The storm raged for two more days. Seven-year-old Jillian couldn’t bring herself to remain inside with the body of her dead grandmother lying in the kitchen, so she stayed in the barn, keeping warm beneath a pile of horse blankets. When the police finally did arrive, she wondered how they had even known she needed help.

The police came with Jillian’s aunt. When they found her in the barn, her aunt suddenly began to cry. She blamed the weather, the terrible weather. She was crying so hard that one of the policemen had to tell Jillian himself that her mother and father wouldn’t be coming home. They had died in a car accident on the way back from selling their sheep. They had fetched a good price early and were trying to beat the storm back to the farm, but they had seriously misjudged it.

One horrible storm had managed to take away the three most important people in Jillian’s life. It was no wonder that rough weather still made her feel so uncomfortable. In fact, storms had grown to become a metaphor for Jillian, representing the uncertainty and cruelty that could be disproportionately visited on one person’s life no matter how little that person had done to deserve it. It was, in part, why she had surrendered herself to a life of science. Science was a world of constants — rules and processes, which could always be counted on. The part she cared not to think about was that science was also a world that was to a significant degree cold, unfeeling, and exceedingly inhuman.

Of course there were people passionate about their pursuits, but very rarely were they passionate about other human beings. In the academic world of “publish or perish,” very few put anything above their love of science. It was indeed a cold place, incredibly enriching for the mind but not so enriching for the soul.

As a remarkably attractive woman, Jillian Alcott was a rarity in the academic world and constantly found herself treated as an object to be possessed rather than as a woman deserving of love. Throughout her education, both her fellow students and many of her professors had desired her simply for her stunning outward appearance. None of them had the courage to look beyond her all too often cold demeanor to see the person she really was. Had anyone taken the time to really study her, to study her with even half the vigor with which they pursued their vaunted scientific investigations, they might have seen a woman who had not yet been able to make it past those two horrific storm-plagued days in Cornwall when she was seven years old, a woman who, though braver than most on the outside, was still, on the inside, incredibly frightened. Life, her career, and even the prospect of learning to love someone again only to have them ripped from her, all terrified Jillian Alcott.

The worse the storm, the worse her feelings of impending doom, and today was no different. On days like this, her only comfort came from indulging herself. And though it sounded terribly clichéd, even to her, the one thing that made her feel better was shopping. And her favorite place to shop was the Harvey Nichols department store in Knightsbridge.

As she exited the Tube station and raced through the rain across Sloane Street, Alcott decided that with nothing but the day’s mail awaiting her at home, she’d make an evening of it at her beloved Harvey Nics. It was either that or the television at home, and as much of a social cripple as she was, Alcott knew it was better for her to be out among the living and breathing.

Alcott decided to head up to the store’s Fifth Floor Café for something to eat before she began her shopping. Finding a small table for two, she placed her belongings on the opposite chair and sat down. The rain pounded against the glass roof and ran down the windows at the front of the café in white foamy sheets that made it appear as if she was sitting behind a waterfall. As a streak of lightning ripped through the sky, followed by a booming peal of thunder, Alcott decided she wanted a glass of wine.

Forty-five minutes later, the storm was still raging as Jillian paid for her meal. Despite the two glasses of Pinot Gris she had consumed, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something bad out there with her name on it. Blaming her unease on the storm, she got up from her table and decided that it was time to do a little shopping.

Taking the escalators to the third floor to browse through the lingerie section, she felt a chill along the back of her long, slender neck. She was even more frightened than before and didn’t know why.

As she moved through the lingerie department, her feelings of impending doom came to a crescendo and finally made sense as a powerfully built man grabbed her urgently by the arm and said, “Come with me if you want to live.”