Sister

“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 cliched 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.