Sister

cleaning.”

She told me that when she was a child, her mother worked long shifts at a factory. After school, Kasia would scrub and polish so that when her mother got home the apartment would sparkle for her. It’s a gift, Kasia’s cleaning.

I didn’t tell her that Mitch wasn’t a carrier of the CF gene. I hadn’t yet told her that Hattie’s baby had died. Last night I’d thought I was protecting her, but now I wondered if I was betraying her trust in me. I honestly didn’t know which was true.

“Here,” I said, handing her tickets. “I have something for you.”

She took the tickets from me, a little bemused.

“I couldn’t afford the air fare to Poland, so these are just coach tickets, six weeks after your baby is due. There’s one for each of us, the baby will travel free.”

I thought that she should take her baby to Poland to meet his grandparents, all four of them, and her uncles and aunts and cousins. She has a cat’s cradle of relations for this baby to be supported by. Mum and Dad both being only children meant we had no web of relations to fall back on. Our family was preshrunk before we were born.

Kasia was just staring at the tickets, uncharacteristically quiet.

“And I’ve got you support stockings, because my friend who’s a doctor says you must be careful not to get a thrombosis, zakrzepica,” I said, translating the last word into Polish, which I’d looked up before. I couldn’t read her expression and was worried I was imposing.

“I don’t have to stay with your family. But I really don’t think you should go that far with a new baby on your own.”

She kissed me. I realized that, despite everything, this was the first time I’d seen her cry.

I have told Mr. Wright about Mitch’s notes.

“I thought that was another reason poor single girls were being chosen—they were less likely to be believed.”

The sunshine has made me feel sleepier rather than waking me up. I finish telling Mr. Wright about Mitch’s notes.

It’s now an effort to be coherent.

“Then I gave Kasia tickets to Poland, and she cried.”

My intellect is too unfocused now to decide what is relevant.

“That night I realized, properly, how brave she’d been. I’d thought her naive and immature, but she’s actually really courageous and I should have seen that when she stood up for me with Mitch, knowing that she’d be hit for it.”

The bruises on her face and the welts on her arms were clear enough badges of courage. But so too was her smiling and dancing in the face of whatever was thrown at her. Like you, she has the gift of finding happiness in small things. She pans life for gold and finds it daily.

And so what if, like you, she loses things? It’s no more a sign of immaturity than my knowledge of where my possessions are is a sign of my adulthood. And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit. I don’t think that’s naive, but fantastically optimistic.

The next morning I knew that I had to tell her what was going on. Who was I to think that after what happened to you, I could look after another person?

“I was going to tell her, but she was already on her mobile phoning half of Poland to tell them about bringing the baby to see them. And then I got another e-mail from Professor Rosen, asking to meet me. Kasia was still chatting to her family when I left the flat.”

I met Professor Rosen, at his suggestion, at the entrance to the Chrom-Med building, which was bustling despite it being Sunday. I was expecting him to escort me to his office, but instead he led me to his car. We got in and he locked the doors. The demonstrators were still there—a distance away—and I couldn’t hear their chants.

Professor Rosen was trying to sound calm but there was a shake in his voice that he couldn’t control. “An active virus vector has been ordered under my cystic fibrosis trial number at St. Anne’s.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Either there’s been a monumental cock-up,” he said, and I thought that he never used words like cock-up, that this was as extreme as his language would get, “or a different gene is being tested out at St. Anne’s, one that needs an active virus vector, and my cystic fibrosis trial is being used as a cover.”

“The cystic fibrosis trial has been hijacked?”

“Maybe, yes. If you want to be melodramatic about it.”

He was trying to belittle what was happening but couldn’t quite pull it off.

“For what?” I asked.

“My guess is that, if an illegal trial is happening, it is for genetic enhancement, which in the UK is illegal to test on humans.”

“What kind of enhancement?”