His image search for Karen Lynch returned a lot of results, but they were more what he’d expect. Karen cropped up as long as a decade ago at medieval history conferences and in previous academic roles, teaching in the history department at King’s College London, and as a PhD student at Harvard. There was nothing unusual in her history, so far as he could tell.
He moved on to Diana Cornish. That search immediately threw up the photograph he’d already seen, of Diana at a society party, and he found another picture of a much younger Diana, one of a group of four in a graduation photograph. He zoomed in. The caption told him that the group were graduating from OxfordUniversity. Diana was recognizable, and one of the other women looked familiar, too. He scanned the names listed: “Alice Trevelyan (First Class Honors: Medieval Languages).” Alice Trevelyan and Diana had studied together. It surprised him. So far as he remembered from what Anya had said, Professor Trevelyan had claimed only to know Diana professionally.
He messaged Anya:Did you know Trevelyan and Cornish were at Oxford together as undergrads?
He’d never liked Trevelyan much. She was a strange woman, a little cold. In retrospect, he wondered if she and Anya had become worryingly close. Sid knew a lot of graduates who formed tight relationships with their supervisors, but no one whose supervisor paid quite so much attention to them as Professor Alice Trevelyan had to Anya. Had it been kindness, or something else? It was Trevelyan, after all, who’d strongly encouraged her to consider St. Andrews.
At every turn Sid was hoping to find something that proved his fears were unfounded, but things got more complicated, and more concerning, as he looked deeper into them. He just wanted everything to be fine, but it was crystal clear that nothing was, absolutely nothing at all.
Anya
I took another crowded train back to London. Time was tight. My flight was that evening, and I needed to get to the airport. Diana still hadn’t replied to my message, and I wondered how things would be between us now. I could never trust her again, that was for sure, but she would be getting what she wanted from me, so hopefully we could work together smoothly enough. Still, her silence worried me. I thought about sending her another message but decided to hold off. Let her come to me.
Sid had messaged again, asking if I knew that Trevelyan and Diana had studied together. I hadn’t known, but after today, it didn’tsurprise me, though it increased my sense of feeling watched and controlled. I wrote back:Makes sense. How do you know?
I got across London on the tube and arrived back at Paddington Station, eyes glazed with tiredness, my foot screaming to have the weight taken off it. I sat on a bench and was dully watching pigeons pecking at crumbs as I waited to board the train to the airport when Viv called.
“Anya, love, your mum’s just been readmitted to hospital. She’s got another infection, and they’re worried it’s sepsis.”
“I’m coming,” I said.
I swapped platforms and just scored a standing-room spot on a crowded commuter train heading out west. My phone lit up with terrifying updates from Viv during the journey.
Her blood pressure plummeted she almost fainted.
She’s having IV ibuprofen and antibiotics, and her temp is down but it still isn’t as low as they’d like.
I’ve told her you’re coming but I don’t know if she’s taken it in. She’s calling for you.
Tell her I’ll be there as fast as I can, I wrote back.
Bristol Royal Infirmary was a mishmash of buildings, old and new, in the city center. The layout and signage were confusing no matter how often you’d been there. I arrived twenty minutes before the end of visiting hours on the acute emergency ward, jabbing at the elevator buttons, running down corridors to make it on time.
The ward, for four people, was full, curtains pulled around two of the beds, but not Mum’s. Viv sat beside the head of the bed. There was a bloody mess around the canula on the back of Mum’s hand, and she was pretty out of it, but she squeezed my hand when I kissed her,and I wiped away the tears slipping down her hot cheek. As I stroked her hair I whispered that she was going to be fine, that she needed to hang in there, that she could do this, that it was a piece of cake.
It seemed like I’d only been there for moments when the nurse said, “We’ll take good care of her tonight. Visiting hours start again at ten tomorrow,” and I realized she was telling us to go.
In the multistory parking lot just up the street, Viv momentarily forgot where she’d parked the car. The composure she’d had on the ward slipped and she looked exhausted. “She was fine,” she said. “We were still celebrating the news about the clinical trial; she was on such a high. Then she threw up and her temperature spiked. I called her treatment team, and they said to bring her in. By the time we got here she could barely walk.”
I knew what she needed to hear: “You did the right thing. Thank you for being there for her. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
We took the elevator up to a floor of the parking lot that had mostly emptied out. Mum’s car sat all alone in its spot, parked badly. The tires squealed as we inched down the spiral ramps, and Viv hit the brakes too soon and too hard all the way home.
She and Mum had left the cottage in such a hurry, there were no lights on when we arrived and it was pitch dark.
We went straight to bed. It felt like the longest day of my life. I unwrapped my foot in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath to re-dress the wound. It was angry and sore. I stood on one foot to brush my teeth. The bathroom mirror had a chip in the corner that had been there my whole life. In the reflection I could see lines drawn on the edge of the door where Mum had marked my height as I grew up. I remembered how it felt to stand there as she balanced a pencil on my head to make those marks.
When I looked at my face it was a shock to see Magnus staring back at me. His eyes, anyway. I wondered how Mum had felt seeing him in me every single day as I grew. How she felt about that now. It made me visualize the rest of him, and I hated it. It felt wrong toimagine his face here, in my childhood home, our sanctum, though it niggled at me that he’d suggested Mum had kept him away. I turned my back on the mirror until I was ready to rinse and left the room without looking again.
I messaged Sid, wondering if he was still awake.
Can you call?
The idea of telling him everything that had happened was daunting. A changedmemightmean a changedus. But I shouldn’t catastrophize. I got into my childhood bed. My body sank gratefully into its familiar hollows, but nothing felt the same. It was like the day Mum was diagnosed. You know you’ve already changed forever, but you don’t know how yet, or whether you’ll sink or swim.
It was impossible to sleep. Everything that had happened fought for space in my head. I wondered if Magnus could help Mum through this new crisis. Maybe get her in a private room, summon specialists. I considered calling him. Before I’d left Cambridge he’d given me his number, promising he’d respond, day or night, if I contacted him.
“I barely sleep,” he’d said. “It’s a curse and a privilege. Sometimes at night I visit my manuscripts. I look at them in candlelight and feel like a time traveler.”
