Sister

2

The police film unit was set up near South Kensington tube station. I—the star of this little film—was given my instructions by a young policeman in a cap rather than a helmet. The trendy director-policeman said “Okay, go.” And I began to walk away from the post office and along Exhibition Road.

You’ve never needed the confidence boost of high heels so I had reluctantly traded mine for your flat ballet pumps. They were too large for me and I’d stuffed the toes with tissues. Remember doing that with Mum’s shoes? Her high heels used to clatter excitingly, the sound of being grown-up. Your soft ballet shoes moved silently, discreetly, their soft indoor leather sinking into ice-cracked puddles and soaking up the sharply cold water. Outside the Natural History Museum there was a long fractious queue of impatient children and harassed parents. The children watched the police and the camera crew, the parents watched me. I was free entertainment until they could get in to see the animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex and the great white whale. But I didn’t care. I was just hoping that one of them had been there the previous Thursday and had noticed you leaving the post office. And then what? What would they have noticed then? I wondered how anything sinister could have happened with so many witnesses.

It started to sleet again, the iced water hammering down onto the pavement. A policeman told me to keep going; although it was snowing the day you disappeared, sleet was near enough. I glanced at the queue outside the Natural History Museum. The buggies and prams had sprouted plastic carapaces. Hoods and umbrellas were covering the parents. The sleet forced them into myopia. No one was looking at me. No one would have been watching you. No one would have noticed anything.

The sleet soaked the wig of long hair and ran in a rivulet down my back. Beneath my open jacket your fine cotton dress, heavy with icy water, clung to my body. Every curve showed. You would have found this funny, a police reconstruction turning into a soft porn movie. A car slowed as it passed me. The middle-aged male driver, warm and dry, looked at me through the windshield. I wondered if someone had stopped and offered you a lift—was that what happened? But I couldn’t allow myself to think about what had happened to you. Wondering would lead me into a maze of horrific scenarios where I would lose my mind, and I had to stay sane or I would be of no help to you.

Back at the police station, Mum met me in the changing room. I was soaked through, shivering uncontrollably from cold and exhaustion. I hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. I started to take off your dress. “Did you know that smell is made up of minute fragments that have broken away?” I asked her. “We learned about it at school once.” Mum, uninterested, shook her head. But as I’d walked in the sleet I’d remembered and realized that the smell of your dress was because tiny particles of you were trapped in the fine cotton fibers. It hadn’t been irrational to think you close to me after all. Okay, yes, in a macabre sort of way.

I handed Mum your dress and started putting on my designer suit.

“Did you have to make her look so shabby?” she asked.

“It’s what she looks like, Mum. It’s no good if nobody recognizes her.”

Mum used to neaten us up whenever our photo was taken. Even during other children’s birthday parties she’d do a quick wipe of a chocolaty mouth, a painful tug with a handbag-sized brush over our hair as soon as she spotted a camera. Even then she told you how much better you would look if “you made an effort like Beatrice.” But I was shamefully glad, because if you did “make an effort” the glaring difference between us would be clear for everyone to see, and because Mum’s criticism of you was a backhanded compliment to me—and her compliments were always sparse on the ground.

Mum handed me back my engagement ring and I slipped it on. I found the weight of it around my finger comforting, as if Todd were holding my hand.

PC Vernon came in, her skin damp with sleet and her pink cheeks even pinker.

“Thank you, Beatrice. You did a fantastic job.” I felt oddly flattered. “It’s going to be broadcast tonight on the local London news,” she continued. “DS Finborough will let you know immediately if there’s any information.”

I was worried a friend of Dad’s would see it on TV and phone him. PC Vernon, emotionally astute, suggested the police in France could tell Dad “face-to-face” that you were missing, as if that was better than us phoning, and I accepted her offer.

Mr. Wright loosens his polyester tie, the first spring sunshine taking centrally heated offices unawares. But I’m grateful for the warmth.

“Did you speak anymore to DS Finborough that day?” he asks.

“Just to confirm the number he could reach me on.”

“What time did you leave the police station?”

“Six-thirty. Mum had left an hour earlier.”

No one at the police station had realized that Mum can’t drive, let alone owns a car. PC Vernon apologized to me, saying that she’d have driven her home herself if she’d known. Looking back on it, I think PC Vernon had the compassion to see the fragile person under the shell of navy pleated skirt and middle-class outrage.

The police station doors swung shut behind me. The dark, ice-hardened air slapped my face. Headlights and streetlights were disorientating, the crowded pavement intimidating. For a moment, among the crowd, I saw you. I’ve since found out it’s common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one among strangers—something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you.

I parked by the top of the steps to your flat. Alongside its tall pristine neighbors your building looked like a poor relative that hadn’t been able to afford a new coat of white paint for years. Carrying the case of your clothes, I went down the steep icy steps to the basement. An orange streetlamp gave barely enough light to see by. How did you manage not to break an ankle in the last three years?

I pressed your doorbell, my fingers numb with cold. For a few seconds I actually hoped that you might answer. Then I started looking under your flowerpots. I knew you hid your front-door key under one of the pots and had told me the name of the occupying plant, but I couldn’t remember it. You and Mum have always been the gardeners. Besides, I was too focused on lecturing you on your lack of security. How could anyone leave their front-door key under a flowerpot right by their door? And in London. It was ridiculously irresponsible. Just inviting burglars right on in.

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked a voice above me. I looked up to see your landlord. The last time I’d seen him he was a storybook grandpa—stick a white beard on him and he’d be a regular Father Christmas. Now his mouth was drawn into a hard scowl, he was unshaven, his eyes glared with the ferocity of a younger man.

“I’m Beatrice Hemming, Tess’s sister. We met once before.”

His mouth softened, his eyes became old. “Amias Thornton. I’m sorry. Memory not what it was.”

He carefully came down the slippery basement steps. “Tess stopped hiding her spare key under the pink cyclamen. Gave it to me.” He unzipped the coin compartment of his wallet and took out a key. You had completely ignored my lecture in the past, so what had made you suddenly so security conscious?

“I let the police in two days ago,” continued Amias. “So they could look for some clue. Is there any news?” He was near to tears.

“I’m afraid not, no.”

My mobile phone rang. Both of us started—I answered it hurriedly. He watched me, so hopeful. “Hello?”

“Hi, darling.” Todd’s voice.

I shook my head at Amias.

“No one’s seen her and she’s been getting weird calls,” I said, startled by the judder in my own voice. “There’s going to be a police reconstruction on TV this evening. I had to pretend to be her.”

“But you look nothing like her,” Todd replied. I found his pragmatism comforting. He was more interested in the casting decision than in the film itself. He obviously thought the reconstruction an absurd overreaction.

“I can look like her. Kind of.”

Amias was carefully going back up the steps toward his own front door.

“Is there a letter from her? The police say she bought airmail stamps just before she went missing.”

“No, there was nothing in the mail.”

But a letter might not have had time to reach New York.

“Can I call you back? I want to keep this phone free in case she tries to ring.”

“Okay, if that’s what you’d prefer.” He sounded annoyed and I was glad you still irritated him. He clearly thought you’d turn up safe and sound and he’d be first in line to lecture you.

I unlocked the door to your flat and went in. I’d only been to your flat, what, two or three times before, and I’d never actually stayed. We were all relieved, I think, that there wasn’t room for Todd and me so the only option was a hotel. I’d never appreciated how badly fitting your windows are. Squalls of sleet-cold air were coming through the gaps. Your walls were impregnated with damp, moist and cold to touch. Your ecofriendly lightbulbs took ages to throw off any decent light. I turned your central heating up to maximum, but only the top two inches of the radiators gave off any heat. Do you simply not notice such things or are you just more stoical than me?

I saw that your phone was disconnected. Was that why your phone had been engaged when I’d tried to ring you over the last few days? But surely you wouldn’t have left it unplugged all that time. I tried to cool my prickling anxiety—you often disconnect the phone when you’re painting or listening to music, resenting its hectoring demand for undeserved attention; so the last time you were here you must have just forgotten to plug it in again.

I started putting your suitcase of clothes away in your wardrobe, welcoming my customary surge of irritation.

“But why on earth can’t you put your wardrobe in the bedroom, where it’s designed to go? It looks ridiculous in here.”

My first visit, wondering why on earth your tiny sitting room was full of a large wardrobe.

“I’ve made my bedroom into a studio,” you replied, laughing before you’d finished your sentence. “Studio” was such a grand name for your tiny basement bedroom.

One of the things I love about you is that you find yourself ridiculous faster than anyone else and laugh at yourself first. You’re the only person I know who finds her own absurdities genuinely funny. Unfortunately, it’s not a family trait.

As I hung up your clothes, I saw a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled it out. Inside were your baby things. Everything in your flat was just so shabby: your clothes were from charity shops, your furniture third hand, and these baby clothes were brand-new and expensive. I took out a pale-blue cashmere baby blanket and a tiny hat, so soft my hands felt coarse. They were beautiful. It was like finding an Eames chair in a bus stop. You couldn’t possibly have afforded them, so who’d given you the money? I thought Emilio Codi had tried to force you to have an abortion. What was going on, Tess?

The doorbell rang and I ran to answer it. I had “Tess” in my mouth, almost out, as I opened the door. A young woman was on the doorstep. I swallowed “Tess.” Some words have a taste. I realized I was shaking from the adrenaline rush.

She was more than six months pregnant but despite the cold, her Lycra top was cropped, showing her distended belly and pierced tummy button. I found her overt pregnancy as cheap as her yellow hair color.

“Is Tess here?” she asked.

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“Yes. Friend. I am Kasia.”

I remembered you telling me about Kasia, your Polish friend, but your description didn’t tally with the reality on the doorstep. You’d been flattering to the point of distortion, lending her a gloss that she simply didn’t have. Standing there in her absurd miniskirt, her legs textured by goose bumps and the raised veins of pregnancy, I thought her far from a “Donatello drawing.”

“Me and Tess met at clinic. No boyfriend too.”

I noted her poor English rather than what she was saying. She looked up at a Ford Escort, parked by the top of the steps. “He came back. Three weeks.”

I hoped my face showed its complete lack of interest in the state of her personal life.

“When will Tess home?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows where she is.” My voice started to wobble, but I’d be damned if I’d show emotion to this girl. The snob in Mum has been healthily passed on to me. I continued briskly, “She hasn’t been seen since last Thursday. Do you know where she might be?”

Kasia shook her head. “We’ve been holiday. Majorca. Making up.”

The man in the Ford Escort was leaning on the horn. Kasia waved up at him and I saw she looked nervous. She asked me to tell you she’d been to see you, in her fractured English, and then hurried up the steps.

Yes, Miss Freud, I was angry she wasn’t you. Not her fault.

I went up the basement steps and rang Amias’s doorbell. He answered it, fiddling with the chain.

“Do you know how Tess got all those expensive baby clothes?” I asked.

“She had a spree in the Brompton Road,” he replied. “She was really chuffed with—”

I impatiently interrupted him, “I meant how did she afford it?”

“I didn’t like to ask.”

It was a reprimand; he had good manners, but I did not.

“Why did you report her missing?” I asked.

“She didn’t come and have supper with me. She’d promised she would and she never broke her promise, even to an old man like me.”

He unhooked the chain. Despite his age, he was still tall and un-stooped, a good few inches taller than I am.

“Maybe you should give the baby things away,” he said.

I was repelled by him and furious. “It’s a little premature to give up on her, isn’t it?”

I turned away from him and walked hurriedly down the steps. He called something after me, but I couldn’t be bothered to try to make it out. I went into your flat.

“Just another ten minutes, and we’ll call it a day,” Mr. Wright says, and I’m grateful. I hadn’t known how physically draining this would be.

“Did you go into her bathroom?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Did you look in her bathroom cabinet?”

I shake my head.

“So you didn’t see anything untoward?”

“Yes, I did.”

I felt exhausted, grimy and bone cold. I longed for a hot shower. It was still two hours till the reconstruction was on TV, so I had plenty of time but I was worried that I wouldn’t hear you if you phoned. So that made me think it was a good idea—following that logic which says your crush is bound to turn up on the doorstep the minute you’ve put on a face mask and your grungiest pajamas. Okay, I agree: logic is hardly the name for it, but I hoped having a shower would make you phone. Besides, I also knew my mobile took messages.

I went into your bathroom. Of course there wasn’t a shower—just your bath with its chipped enamel and mold around the taps. I was struck by the contrast to my bathroom in New York, an homage to modernist chic in chrome and limestone. I wondered how you could possibly feel clean after being in there. I had a familiar moment of feeling superior and then I saw it: a shelf with your toothbrush, toothpaste, contact lens solutions and a hairbrush with long hairs trapped among the bristles.

I realized I’d been harboring the hope that you’d done something silly and studentlike and gone off to whatever festival or protest was on at the moment, that you’d been your usual irresponsible self and hang the consequences of being more than eight months pregnant and camping in a snowy field. I’d fantasized about lecturing you for your crass thoughtlessness. Your shelf of toiletries crashed my fantasy. There was no harbor for hope. Wherever you were, you hadn’t intended to go there.

Mr. Wright switches off the tape machine. “Let’s end it there.” I nod, trying to blink away the image of your long hairs in the bristles of your hairbrush.

A matronly secretary comes in and tells us that the press outside your flat has become alarming in number. Mr. Wright is solicitous, asking me if I’d like him to find me somewhere else to stay.

“No. Thank you. I want to be at home.”

I call your flat home now, if that’s okay with you. I have been living there for two months and it feels that way.

“Would you like me to give you a lift?” he asks. He must see my surprise because he smiles. “It’s no trouble. And I’m sure today has been an ordeal.”

The printed polyester tie was a present. He is a nice man.

I politely turn down his offer and he escorts me to the lift. “Your statement will take several days. I hope that’s all right?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“It’s because you were the principal investigator as well as being our principal witness.”

“Investigator” sounds too professional for what I did. The lift arrives and Mr. Wright holds the door open for me, making sure I get safely inside.

“Your testimony is going to seal our case,” he tells me, and as I go down in the crowded lift, I imagine my words being like tar, coating the hull of the prosecution boat, making it watertight.

Outside, the spring sunshine has warmed the early evening air, and by cafés white mushroom parasols sprout from hard gray pavements. The CPS offices are only a couple of streets away from St. James’s Park and I think that I will walk some of the way home.

I try to take a shortcut toward the park, but my hoped-for cut-through is a dead end. I retrace my footsteps and hear footsteps behind me, not the reassuring click-clack of high heels but the quietly threatening tread of a man. Even as I feel afraid, I am aware of the cliché of the woman being stalked by evil and try to banish it, but the footsteps continue, closer now, their heavy tread louder. Surely he will overtake me, walking on the other side, showing he means no harm. Instead, he comes closer. I can feel the chill of his breath on the back of my neck. I run, my movements jerky with fear. I reach the end of the cul-de-sac and see people walking along a crowded pavement. I join them and head for the tube, not looking round.

I tell myself that it is just not possible. He’s on remand, locked up in prison, refused bail. After the trial he’s going to go to prison for the rest of his life. I must have imagined it.

I get into a tube and risk a look around the carriage. Immediately I see a photo of you. It’s on the front page of the Evening Standard, it’s the one I took in Vermont when you visited two summers ago, the wind whirling your hair out behind you like a shining sail, your face glowing. You are arrestingly beautiful. No wonder they chose it for their front page. Inside there’s the one I took when you were six, hugging Leo. I know you had just been crying, but there’s no sign of it. Your face had pinged back to normal as soon as you smiled for me. Next to your picture is one of me that they took yesterday. My face doesn’t ping back. Fortunately, I no longer mind what I look like in photographs.

I get out at Ladbroke Grove tube station, noticing how deftly Londoners move—up stairways and through ticket barriers—without touching another person. As I reach the exit, I again feel someone too close behind me, his cold breath on my neck, the prickle of menace. I hurry away, bumping into other people in my haste, trying to tell myself that it was a draft made by the trains below.

Maybe terror and dread, once experienced, embed themselves into you even when the cause has gone, leaving behind a sleeping horror, which is too easily awakened.

I reach Chepstow Road, and am stunned by the mass of people and vehicles. There are news crews from every UK station and, from the looks of it, from most of the ones abroad too. Yesterday’s collection of press now seems a village fete that’s morphed into a frenetic theme park.

I am ten doors away from your flat when the chrysanthemums technician spots me. I brace myself, but he turns away; again his kindness takes me aback. Two doors later a reporter sees me. He starts to come toward me and then they all do. I run down the steps, make it inside, and slam the door.

Outside, sound booms fill the space like triffids; lenses of obscene length are shoved up to the glass. I pull the curtains across, but their lights are still blinding through the flimsy material. As I did yesterday, I retreat to the kitchen, but there’s no sanctuary in there. Someone is hammering on the back door and the front doorbell is buzzing. The phone stops for a second at most, then rings again. My mobile joins in the cacophony. How did they get that number? The sounds are insistent and hectoring, demanding a response. I think back to the first evening I spent in your flat. I thought then that there was nothing as lonely as a phone that didn’t ring.

At 10:20 p.m. I watched the TV reconstruction on your sofa, pulling your Indian throw over me in a futile effort to keep warm. From a distance, I really was quite a convincing you. At the end there was an appeal for information and a number to ring.

At 11:30 p.m. I picked up the phone to check that it was working. Then I panicked that in that moment of checking, someone had been trying to ring: you, or the police to tell me you’d been found.

12:30 a.m. Nothing.

1:00 a.m. I felt the surrounding quietness suffocating me.

1:30 a.m. I heard myself shout your name. Or was your name buried in the silence?

2:00 a.m. I heard something by the door. I hurried to open it but it was just a cat, the stray you’d adopted months before. The milk in the fridge was more than a week old and sour. I had nothing to stop its cries.

At 4:30 a.m. I went into your bedroom, squeezing past your easel and stacks of canvases. I cut my foot and bent down to find shards of glass. I drew back the bedroom curtains and saw a sheet of polyethylene taped over the broken windowpane. No wonder it was freezing in the flat.

I got into your bed. The polyethylene was flapping in the icy wind, the irregular inhuman noise as disturbing as the cold. Under your pillow were your pajamas. They had the same smell as your dress. I hugged them, too cold and anxious to sleep. Somehow I must have.

I dreamed of the color red: Pantone numbers PMS 1788 to PMS 1807—the color of cardinals and harlots, of passion and pomp; cochineal dye from the crushed bodies of insects; crimson; scarlet; the color of life; the color of blood.

The doorbell woke me.

Tuesday

I arrive at the CPS office where spring has officially arrived. The faint scent of freshly mown grass from the park wafts in with each turn of the revolving door; the receptionists on the front desk are in summer dresses with brown faces and limbs that must have been self-tanned last night. Despite the warm weather, I am in thick clothes, overdressed and pale, a winter leftover.

As I go toward Mr. Wright’s office, I want to confide in him about my imagined stalker of yesterday. I just need to hear, again, that he is locked away in prison and after the trial will stay there for life. But when I go in, the spring sunshine floods the room, the electric light glares down, and in their brightness my ghost of fear left over from yesterday is blanched into nothing.

Mr. Wright turns on the tape recorder and we begin.

“I’d like to start today with Tess’s pregnancy,” he says, and I feel subtly reprimanded. Yesterday he asked me to start when I first “realized something was wrong,” and I began with Mum’s phone call during our lunch party. But I know now that wasn’t the real beginning. And I also know that if I had taken more time to be with you, if I had been less preoccupied with myself and listened harder, I might have realized something was very wrong months earlier.

“Tess became pregnant six weeks into her affair with Emilio Codi,” I say, editing out all the emotion that went with that piece of news.

“How did she feel about that?” he asks.

“She said she’d discovered that her body was a miracle.”

I think back to our phone call.

“Almost seven billion miracles walking around on this earth, Bee, and we don’t even believe in them.”

“Did she tell Emilio Codi?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes.”

“How did he react?”

“He wanted her to have the pregnancy terminated. Tess told him the baby wasn’t a train.”

Mr. Wright smiles and quickly tries to hide it, but I like him for the smile.

“When she wouldn’t, he told her she’d have to leave the college before the pregnancy started to show.”

“And did she?”

“Yes. Emilio told the authorities she’d been offered a sabbatical somewhere. I think he even came up with an actual college.”

“So who knew about it?”

“Her close friends, including other art students. But Tess asked them not to tell the college.”

I just couldn’t understand why you protected Emilio. He hadn’t earned that from you. He’d done nothing to deserve it.

“Did he offer Tess any help?” asks Mr. Wright.

“No. He accused her of tricking him into pregnancy and said that he wouldn’t be pressured into helping her or the baby in any way.”

“Had she ‘tricked’ him?” asks Mr. Wright.

I’m surprised at the amount of detail he wants from me, but then remember that he wants me to tell him everything and let him decide later what is relevant.

“No. The pregnancy wasn’t intentional.”

I remember the rest of our phone call. I was in my office overseeing a new corporate identity for a restaurant chain, multitasking with my job as older sister.

“But how can it possibly be an accident, Tess?”

The design team had chosen Bernard MT condensed typeface, which looked old-fashioned rather than the retro look I’d briefed.

“Accident sounds a little negative, Bee. Surprise is better.”

“Okay, how can you get a ‘surprise’ when there’s a drugstore in every high street selling condoms?”

You laughed affectionately, teasing me as I chastised you. “Some people just get carried away in the moment.”

I felt the implied criticism. “But what are you going to do?”

“Get larger and larger and then have a baby.”

You sounded so childish; you were acting so childishly, how could you possibly become a mother?

“It’s happy news; don’t be cross.”

“Did she ever consider an abortion?” Mr. Wright asks.

“No.”

“You were brought up as Catholics?”

“Yes, but that wasn’t why she wouldn’t have an abortion. The only Catholic sacrament Tess ever believed in is the sacrament of the present moment.”

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know…”

I know that it’s of no use to the trial, but I’d like him to know more about you than hard-edged facts in black three-ring binders.

“It means living in the here and now,” I explain. “Experiencing the present without worrying about the future or cluttering it with the past.”

I’ve never bought that sacrament; it’s too irresponsible, too hedonistic. It was probably tacked on by the Greeks—Dionysus gate-crashing Catholicism to make sure they at least had a party.

There’s something else I want him to know. “Even at the beginning, when the baby was little more than a collection of cells, she loved him. That’s why she thought her body was a miracle. That’s why she would never have had an abortion.”

He nods, and gives your love for your baby a decently respectful pause.

“When was the baby diagnosed with cystic fibrosis?” he asks.

I am glad he called him a baby and not a fetus. You and your baby are starting to become more human to him now.

“At twelve weeks,” I reply. “Because of our family history of CF, she had a genetic screen.”

“It’s me.” I could tell that at the other end of the phone you were struggling not to cry. “He’s a boy.” I knew what was coming. “He has cystic fibrosis.” You sounded so young. I didn’t know what to say to you. You and I knew too much about CF for me to offer platitudes. “He’s going to go through all of that, Bee, just like Leo.”

“So that was in August?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes. The tenth. Four weeks later she phoned to tell me that she’d been offered a new genetic therapy for her baby.”

“What did she know about it?” asks Mr. Wright.

“She said that the baby would be injected with a healthy gene to replace the cystic fibrosis gene. And it would be done while he was still in the womb. As he developed and grew, the new gene would continue to replace the faulty cystic fibrosis gene.”

“What was your reaction?”

“I was frightened of the risks she’d be taking. First, with the vector and—”

Mr. Wright interrupts. “Vector? I’m sorry I don’t…”

“It’s the way a new gene gets into the body. A taxi, if you like. Viruses are often used as vectors because they are good at infecting cells in the body, and so they carry in the new gene at the same time.”

“You’re quite an expert.”

“In our family we’re all amateur experts in the genetics field, because of Leo.”

“But people have died in these gene therapy trials, Tess. All their organs failing.”

“Just let me finish, please? They’re not using a virus as a vector. That’s the brilliant thing about it. Someone’s managed to make an artificial chromosome to get the gene into the baby’s cells. So there’s no risk to the baby. It’s incredible, isn’t it?”

It was incredible. But it didn’t stop me from worrying. I remember the rest of our phone call. I was wearing my full older-sister uniform.

“Okay, so there won’t be a problem with the vector. But what about the modified gene itself? What if it doesn’t just cure the CF but does something else that hasn’t been predicted?”

“Could you please stop worrying?”

“It might have some appalling side effect. It might mess up something else in the body that isn’t even known about.”

“Bee—”

“Okay, so it might seem like a small risk—”

You interrupted, elbowing me off my soapbox. “Without this therapy, he has cystic fibrosis. A big fat one-hundred-percent definite on that. So a small risk is something I have to take.”

“You said they’re going to inject it into your tummy?”

I could hear the smile in your voice. “How else will it get into the baby?”

“So this gene therapy could well affect you too.”

You sighed. It was your “please get off my back” sigh, the sigh of a younger sister to an older one.

“I’m your sister. I have a right to be concerned about you.”

“And I’m my baby’s mother.”

Your response took me aback.

“I’ll write to you, Bee.”

You hung up.

“Did she often write to you?” asks Mr. Wright.

I wonder if he’s interested or if there’s a point to the question.

“Yes. Usually when she knew I’d disapprove of something. Sometimes when she just needed to sort out her thoughts and wanted me as a silent sounding board.”

I’m not sure if you know this, but I’ve always enjoyed your one-way conversations. Although they often exasperate me, it’s liberating to be freed from my role as critic.

“The police gave me a copy of her letter,” says Mr. Wright.

I’m sorry. I had to hand all your letters to the police.

He smiles. “The human angels letter.”

I’m glad that he’s highlighted what mattered to you, not what’s important for his investigation. And I don’t need the letter to remember that part of it:

“All these people—people I don’t know, didn’t even know about—have been working hour after hour, day after day for years and years to find a cure. To start with, the research was funded by charitable donations. There really are angels, human angels in white lab coats and tweed skirts, organizing fun runs and bake sales and shaking buckets so that one day someone they’ve never even met has her baby cured.”

“Was it her letter that allayed your fears about the therapy?” asks Mr. Wright.

“No. The day before I got it, the gene therapy trial hit the U.S. press. Chrom-Med’s genetic cure for cystic fibrosis was all over the papers and wall to wall on TV. But there were just endless pictures of cured babies and very little science. Even the broadsheets used the words ‘miracle baby’ far more than ‘genetic cure.’”

Mr. Wright nods. “Yes. It was the same here.”

“But it was also all over the Net, which meant I could research it thoroughly. I found out that the trial had met all the statutory checks, more than the statutory checks, actually. Twenty babies in the UK had so far been born free of CF and were perfectly healthy. The mothers had suffered no ill effects. Pregnant women in America who had fetuses with cystic fibrosis were begging for the treatment. I realized how lucky Tess was to be offered it.”

“What did you know about Chrom-Med?”

“That they were well established and had been doing genetic research for years. And that they had paid Professor Rosen for his chromosome and then employed him to continue his research.”

Allowing your ladies in tweed skirts to stop shaking buckets.

“I’d also watched half a dozen or so TV interviews with Professor Rosen, the man who’d invented the new cure.”

I know it shouldn’t have made a difference, but it was Professor Rosen who changed my mind about the therapy, or at least opened it. I remember the first time I saw him on TV.

The morning TV presenter purred her question at him. “So how does it feel, Professor Rosen, to be the ‘man behind the miracle,’ as some people are dubbing you?”

Opposite her, Professor Rosen looked absurdly clichéd with his wire glasses and narrow shoulders and furrowed brow, a white coat no doubt hanging up somewhere off camera. “It’s hardly a miracle. It’s taken decades of research and—”

She interrupted. “Really.”

It was a full stop, but he misinterpreted her and took it as an invitation to carry on. “The CF gene is on chromosome seven. It makes a protein called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, CFTR for short.”

She smoothed her tight pencil skirt over her streamlined legs, smiling at him. “If we could have the simple version, Professor Rosen.”

“This is the simple version. I created an artificial microchromosome—”

“I really don’t think our viewers…” she said, waving her hands as if this were beyond mortal understanding. I was irritated by her and was glad when Professor Rosen was too.

“Your viewers are blessed with brains, are they not? My artificial chromosome can safely transport a new healthy gene into the cells with no risks.”

I thought that someone probably had had to coach him in how to present his science in noddy language. It was as if Professor Rosen himself were dismayed by it and could do it no longer. “The human artificial chromosome not only introduces but also stably maintains therapeutic genes. Synthetic centromeres were—”

She hurriedly interrupted him. “I’m afraid we’ll have to skip our science lesson today, Professor, because I’ve got someone who wants to say a special thank you.”

She turned to a large TV screen, which had a live feed from a hospital. A teary-eyed mother and proud new father, cuddling their healthy newborn, thanked Professor Rosen for curing their beautiful baby boy. Professor Rosen clearly found it distasteful and was embarrassed by it. He wasn’t reveling in his success and I liked him for it.

“So you trusted Professor Rosen?” asks Mr. Wright, without volunteering his own impression, but he must have seen him on TV during the media saturation of the story.

“Yes. In all the TV interviews I watched of him he came across as a committed scientist, with no media savvy. He seemed modest, embarrassed by praise and clearly not enjoying his moment of TV fame.”

I don’t tell Mr. Wright this, but he also reminded me of Mr. Normans (did you have him for math?), a kindly man but one who had no truck with the silliness of adolescent girls, and used to bark out equations like firing rounds. Lack of media savvy, wire-rimmed glasses and a resemblance to an old teacher weren’t logical reasons to finally accept the trial was safe, but the personal nudge I’d needed to overcome my reservations.

“Did Tess describe what happened when she was given the therapy?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Not in any detail, no. She just said that she’d had the injection and now she’d have to wait.”

You phoned me in the middle of the night, forgetting or not caring about the time difference. Todd woke up and took the call. Annoyed, he passed the phone to me, mouthing, “It’s four-thirty in the morning, for chrissakes.”

“It’s worked, Bee. He’s cured.”

I cried—sobbing, big-wet-tears crying. I had been so worried, not about your baby, but about what it would be like for you looking after and loving a child with CF. Todd thought something terrible had happened.

“That’s bloody wonderful.”

I don’t know what surprised him more, the fact I was crying over something wonderful, or that I swore.

“I’d like to call him Xavier. If Mum doesn’t mind.”

I remembered Leo being so proud of his second name, how he’d wished it were what he was called.

“Leo would think that really cool,” I said, and thought how sad it is that someone dies when they’re still young enough to say “really cool.”

“Yeah, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Mr. Wright’s middle-aged secretary interrupts with mineral water, and I am suddenly overwhelmed by thirst. I drink my flimsy paper cupful straight down and she looks a little disapproving. As she takes the empty cup, I notice that the insides of her hands are stained orange. Last night she must have done a self-tan. I find it moving that this large heavyset woman has tried to make herself spring pretty. I smile at her but she doesn’t see. She’s looking at Mr. Wright. I see in that look that she’s in love with him, that it was for him she’d made her arms and face go brown last night, that the dress she’s wearing was bought with him in mind.

Mr. Wright interrupts my mental gossip. “So as far as you were concerned, there weren’t any problems with the baby or the pregnancy?”

“I thought everything was fine. My only worry was how she would cope as a single mother. At the time it seemed like a big worry.”

Miss Crush Secretary leaves, barely noticed by Mr. Wright, who’s looking across the table at me. I glance at his hand, on her behalf—it’s bare of a wedding ring. Yes, my mind is doodling again, reluctant to move on. You know what’s coming. I’m sorry.