The file in question was currently hidden in the bottom of my suitcase, out of Evelyn’s sight. I half-hoped she’d forgotten about it, but forgetfulness was not in Evelyn’s nature.
“I can’t exactly give it back,” I said in a low tone. For all I knew, a plain-clothed constable could be sitting nearby. “They would charge or arrest me for taking it in the first place.”
“Perhaps that would persuade you from committing such acts of stupidity in the future,” Evelyn replied.
I let out an exasperated sigh. “I did it on a whim, okay? I saw it there, on the edge of the desk, and it was so easy. I didn’t think about the consequences.”
“Clearly.”
“I’ll give it back,” I promised. “I can mail it—”
“If you mail it, they might trace it back to me,” Evelyn cut in. “Is that what you want? To implicate me and put me out of a job? You know I have security clearances, right? If I get arrested for your mistake, my company won’t be able to employ me anymore.”
She was still mad. Despite her controlled emotions, she couldn’t conceal the slight quaver in her voice at the end of her last sentence. Most people wouldn’t have caught it, but I had spent years studying Evelyn’s protective outer shell. Every once in a while, I found a crack in it.
“I’ll go back to the station, then,” I promised. “I’ll say I found the file on the ground outside or something. Maybe if I dirty the pages—”
“Forget it,” Evelyn said shortly. “They won’t believe you. Keep it hidden. We’ll figure out what to do with it if the time comes to do so.”
“We?” I ventured.
“Don’t push it.” She fiddled with the strap of her brace. “This piece of shite keeps digging into my neck.”
My chair scraped as I got up to help. While I rearranged the strap to sit more comfortably against Evelyn’s collar, I noticed the woman at the next table over was reading an article about William Lewis’s death. It was dated that morning. According to the article, the police remained stumped and clueless about the homicide.
Evelyn noticed my lack of attention to her brace and glanced over her shoulder. With her good arm, she pulled me back into my chair. “Enough already,” she said. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to Oxford.”
Once upon a time, I dreamed of attending the University of Oxford. It was a place of paradise to me for many reasons. My mother had studied there, and she loved it so much that she became a professor to remain there. As a child, I admired her tortoiseshell glasses and smart blazers. She always smelled of the ancient libraries she spent so much time in, a scent that made me want to lay my head on her chest and never move. She always spoke of this piece of literature or that one and how they influenced modern books. Her field of study also included the English language, and I often found her reading texts of unfamiliar runes and words. Later, I discovered it was Old English and that my mother could translate it instantaneously.
At Oxford, my mother met my father. He had traveled from New York to visit the Divinity School as a graduate student in religious studies. After an afternoon tour of the Radcliffe Camera, Nathan Frye encountered Priya Pearson at the café in the new library. She accidentally picked up his coffee instead of her own, and the rest was history—a complicated, messy history that resulted in having married parents, in an indefinite long-distance relationship, who resided on different continents.
As the daughter of two scholars, it was natural for me to lust after Oxford’s academics as well. Evelyn and I had joined a class trip to the campus during our time at boarding school. We toured the lecture halls and various libraries, but I already knew every inch of the campus by then. I begged the trip’s organizer to let me visit my mother’s office, and when they said no, I snuck off to see her anyway. She was shocked when I showed up beside her desk and promptly returned me to the rest of my class. After that, I swore to myself I’d have the authority to roam Oxford unimpeded one day. Of course, the universe had its way and that day never came.
“What did you want to study?” Evelyn asked as we packed the car with snacks, got on the road, and headed northwest.
From Whitechapel, it took almost two hours to reach Oxford, but I didn’t mind taking the wheel. Evelyn usually protested against road trips—her legs were too long for her to stay cooped up in a car for more than half an hour—but she encouraged this one. Anything to get my head off the Ripper case.
“Archaeology and anthropology.”
She knew this already. When I lamented about my lost potential, which I did often in the years following my mother’s death, I filled Evelyn’s ears with mournful proclamations of how much I desired to study the subject. At one point, when we were sharing a flat before I moved back to the States, she’d invested in a pair of noise-canceling headphones to drown out my repetitive complaints.
“That’s right,” she said, as if recalling those moments between us. “I never understood why you thought humans were so interesting.”
“I never understood how you don’t think we’re interesting,” I countered. “Have you studied evolution? It’s fascinating. Adaptation alone is such a bizarre concept. I mean, can you believe the human body is so capable of changing itself to fit the world around us?”
“No,” she replied dryly. “Because we’re too busy trying to change the world to fit our needs.”
“I meant back then.”
She stretched her legs across the dashboard and watched the scenery rush by the window. “Is there anything anthropological that I would be
