Page 4

The back of the paper was simply black.

Assessment and instruction.

It sounded like school. It also sounded a little like prison.

Possibly something in between.

A very sensible part of me, a part that sounded suspiciously like Daniel, insisted that the whole thing was obviously a scam. Or a prank. Or one of those elaborate immersive marketing campaigns for a new television show. According to that part of my brain, the correct response was to throw the envelope in the recycling, go upstairs, and get some sleep.

Unfortunately, there was another part of me too.

It was the part that read books with shirtless men on the covers under the comforter at three in the afternoon, when everyone assumed night-shift workers were sleeping. It was the part that, at eleven years old, had spent an entire summer vacation secretly waiting for an owl to arrive at the window with a letter addressed to me.

That part of me had gone very still.

It was standing somewhere inside my chest, holding its breath.

I was ashamed of it.

I was twenty-two years old, and apparently some piece of me was still waiting for a letter that would explain why I had never quite felt like everyone else. I was still hoping that someone, somewhere, might eventually show up and tell me there had been a mistake.

You were never supposed to be ordinary.

The stairs creaked behind me.

Marion came down in her purple quilted robe. Her gray hair was flattened on one side from sleep. She was fifty-eight, five foot one, and had spent thirty years as a ward sister. Once, I had watched her tell a consultant surgeon to sit down in a tone that left no room for argument, and he had sat.

"You're late back," she said. "Was it a bad one?"

"A dog." I held up the envelope. "Marion, what is this?"

The color drained out of her until she looked gray rather than pale, as though someone had reached inside her and turned everything down at once.

"Oh, love," she said quietly. "Oh no. Not yet."

"Not yet what?"

She came down the last three stairs very slowly, one hand wrapped around the banister as though it were the only solid thing left in the house. When she reached me, she took the letter from my hand and read it.

Her lips moved slightly when she reached the words refusal is not permitted.

Then she folded the letter carefully along its existing creases, neat and precise in the way she did everything, and handed it back to me.

"Put the kettle on," she said. "I need to get something from the loft."

"Marion."

"Kettle, Wren."

I put the kettle on.

I stood in the kitchen, surrounded by yellow tiles and the calendar from the Chinese takeout, listening to Marion drag the loft ladder down from the ceiling. My heart was beating so hard and fast that it felt like a bird had somehow flown into my chest and was battering itself against my ribs, desperate to find a way back out.

When Marion returned, she was carrying a cookie tin.

It was an old Quality Street tin, its purple faded to the dull color of the wrappers from the good toffees after they had been sitting around too long. She placed it on the table between our mugs and rested both hands on the lid for a moment.

Then she opened it like it might bite.