Sister

laying my guts out here and you can’t even be bothered to look up from the fucking Internet.”

I turned to him, and only then saw his white face and his body huddled into itself in misery.

“I’m sorry. But I can’t leave. Not till I know what happened to her.”

“We know what happened to her. And you need to accept that. Because life has to go on, Beatrice. Our life.”

“Todd …”

“I do know how hard it must be for you without her. I do understand that. But you do have me.” His eyes were blurred with tears. “We’re getting married in three months.”

I tried to work out what to say and in the silence he walked away from me into the kitchen. How could I explain to him that I couldn’t get married anymore, because marriage is a commitment to the future, and a future without you was impossible to contemplate? And that it was for this reason, rather than my lack of passion for him, that meant I couldn’t marry him.

I went into the kitchen. His back was toward me and I saw what he would look like as an old man.

“Todd, I’m sorry but—”

He turned and yelled at me, “For fuck’s sake I love you.” Shouting at a foreigner in your own language as if volume will make her understand, make me love him back.

“You don’t really know me. You wouldn’t love me if you did.”

It was true. He didn’t know me. I’d never let him. If I had a song, I’d never tried singing it to him, never stayed in bed with him on a Sunday morning. It was always my idea to get up and go out. Maybe he had looked into my eyes but if he had, I hadn’t been looking back.

“You deserve more,” I said, and tried to take his hand. But he pulled it away. “I’m so sorry.”

He flinched from me. But I was sorry. I still am. Sorry that I had neglected to notice that it was only me on the safe beltway while he was inside the relationship, alone and exposed. Once again I had been selfish and cruel toward someone I was meant to care for.

Before you died, I’d thought our relationship was grown-up and sensible. But on my part it was cowardly, a passive option motivated by my insecurity rather than what Todd deserved: an active choice inspired by love.

A few minutes later he left. He didn’t tell me where he was going.

Mr. Wright had decided on a working lunch and has now got sandwiches from the deli. He leads me through empty corridors to a meeting room that has a table. For some reason, the large office space, deserted apart from us two, feels intimate.

I haven’t told Mr. Wright that during my research I broke off my engagement, and that with no friends in London, Todd must have walked through the snow to a hotel that night. I just tell him about Chrom-Med floating on the stock market.

“And you phoned DS Finborough at eleven-thirty p.m.?” he asks, looking down at the police call log.

“Yes. I left a message for him asking him to phone me back. By nine-thirty the next morning he still hadn’t, so I went to St. Anne’s.”

“You’d already planned to go back there?”

“Yes. The senior midwife had said she would have found Tess’s notes by then and had made an appointment for me to see her.”

I arrived at St. Anne’s, the skin around my skull tight with nerves because I thought I would soon have to meet the person who was with you when you had Xavier. I knew I had to do this but wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe as a penance, my guilt faced full on. I arrived fifteen minutes early and went to the hospital cafe. As I sat down with my coffee, I saw I had a new e-mail.From: Professor Rosen’s office, Chrom-Med To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

Dear Ms. Hemming: I assure you that we offer no financial inducement whatsoever to the participants in our trial. Each participant volunteers without coercion or inducement. If you would like to check with the participating hospitals’ ethics committees you will see that the highest ethical principles are strictly enforced.

Kind regards

Sarah Stonaker, Media PA to Professor Rosen

I e-mailed straight back.From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone To: [email protected]

One “participant” was my sister. She was paid ?300 to take part in the trial. Her name was Tess Hemming (second name Annabel, after her grandmother). She was 21. She was murdered after giving birth to her stillborn baby. Her funeral and that of her son is on Thursday. I miss her more than you can possibly imagine.

It felt like a reasonable place to be writing such an e-mail. Illness and death may be shut away in the wards above, but I imagined the fall-out blowing invisibly into the atrium and landing in the hospital cafe’s cappuccinos and herbal teas. I wouldn’t have been the first to write an emotional e-mail at this table. I wondered if the “Media PA” would pass it on to Professor Rosen. I doubted it.

I resolved to ask the hospital staff if they knew anything about the money.

Five minutes before my appointment time I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing.

The senior midwife seemed fraught when she saw me, although maybe her escaping frizzy red hair made her seem that way all the time. “I’m afraid we still haven’t found Tess’s notes. And without them I haven’t been able to find out who was with her when she gave birth.”

I felt relief but thought it cowardly to give in to.

“Doesn’t anyone remember?”

“I’m afraid not. For the last three months we’ve been very short staffed, so we’ve had a high percentage of