The scent of fresh-baked sweet rolls, glazed in marmalade, wafts from the folded-over paper bag balanced atop the mountain of parcels in Jane’s arms. It’s maddening, taunting her as she winds through the slushy London streets, cold nipping at her cheeks, wind tugging her coat hem. It took all her willpower not to tear into the bag the moment she made her purchase, but she promised herself she’d save them to share them with Peg.
The sweet rolls, a mutual favorite, are just one part of the celebration they have planned tonight for surviving their first term at the Royal College. Tomorrow they’ll both go their separate ways, home for the holidays, and Jane already feels a pang at the thought. She’s never met someone she liked as instantly, or got along with as well as Peg. Even though it’s only a short break before classes start again, Jane will miss her.
She and Peg met on their very first day at the college, and although Peg ultimately switched out of the medical program into the pharmaceutical program, they’ve still been together every single day since that first, deciding to become flatmates only a week after they’d met. They’d bonded almost instantly over being the only two female students in the room in their first anatomy class. And they’d quickly discovered that unlike the young men in their classes, they had to work twice as hard to prove they deserved their place there. They’d sworn then and there to always have each other’s backs, to support each other, and to not let each other quit, no matter how bad things got.
Jane can’t imagine giving up on her dream of becoming a doctor, but there are times when simply getting through a day is exhausting. But knowing Peg is going through the same thing makes it so much easier to bear. Lately there have been rumors that the Royal College is trying to block women from sitting medical exams again. With the war, Jane would think more doctors would be wanted, not fewer, but apparently while dying of sepsis from a treatable wound would be a terrible fate, for some the idea of letting a “lady doctor” do the treating is simply a bridge too far.
As their building comes into sight, Jane pushes the bitter thought down. While she was grateful for her heavy wool coat outside, by the time she climbs the stairs to their door, she’s sweating. She manages to get the door unlocked without dropping any packages, and steps inside.
“Is the kettle on?” Jane sets her packages on the table, unwinding her scarf and freeing herself from her coat.
Peg doesn’t answer. More likely than not, she’s lost in one of her mystery novels. It never ceases to amaze Jane how Peg can read the same book several times over and still get as much enjoyment out of it the third time as the first.
“What’s the point after you know who the murderer is?” she’d asked once.
“That’s the best part!” Peg had answered her with a grin. “The second time around you get to go back and see all the clever clues the author put in that you missed the first time.”
“What about the third time?”
But Peg had only stuck her tongue out. Last Jane checked, Peg was working her way through all of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels again. How she finds time on top of her schoolwork, not to mention spending time with Simon, Jane will never know.
“Peg?” She hangs her coat and scarf from the hook by the door, shaking the last drops of melted snow from her bobbed hair.
Surely Peg must have heard her come in by now. Unless she’s with Simon, the two of them holed up in a tea shop somewhere, lost in each other and oblivious to the weather outside. The thought makes Jane smile. She’d met Simon early on too, one of the handful of decent male students who’d never questioned Jane’s right to be in the program. She’d been the one to introduce Peg and Simon. Simon had been so painfully shy that Jane never would have imagined a relationship blossoming—not that she’d been trying to set them up—but they’d hit it off, Peg balancing Simon’s blushing and tongue-tied speech with openness and enthusiasm.
“Peg?” Jane plucks the pastry bag from the top of her stack of parcels. She sets the kettle on to boil in the flat’s tiny kitchen and leaves it heating to knock on Peg’s door.
The door swings inward. Jane is about to wave the pastry bag in front of the gap, wafting the scent into Peg’s room, but she stops.
Absence breathes out from the open door, making all the hairs on the back of Jane’s neck stand on end. There’s a kind of missingness that goes far deeper than Peg simply not being there.
Jane pushes the door open all the way.
The pastry bag drops from her hand. Peg lies sprawled across her narrow bed, sheets rumpled beneath her. She is there, Jane can clearly see her, and she is not. Jane’s gaze slides away from her flatmate, her friend, and Jane has to force herself to look at Peg, to see her. It’s not squeamishness. It’s as if Peg no longer belongs in the world and so the world is trying to erase her.
Jane’s stomach churns with the utter wrongness. She’s watched her professors peel back skin to reveal different muscle groups, crack ribcages to show all the organs lined up inside, saw bones into neat cross-sections to reveal the marrow inside, but this is something else altogether. Jane knows how a human body is meant to work, all the things that make it move and breathe, and what happens when those processes stop. This is not that. Even though she can plainly see Peg, it’s as though something fully snipped her from existence, leaving a Peg-shaped hole behind.
Jane forces herself to step farther into the room even though a thickness in the air tries to resist her. She touches the pulse-points at Peg’s wrist and below her jaw, even knowing what she will find. She draws her fingers away from the waxen coolness of Peg’s skin as quickly as she can. There’s an extra pallor to Peg’s flesh, as though she’s already been drained of every last drop of her blood, but the sheets beneath her remain pristine, the walls unmarred. There’s no sign of violence, no marks on her skin, no evidence of a struggle.
A strand of Peg’s dark hair lies across her cheek, almost touching the corner of her mouth, which is open as though she died in the act of taking a breath, or was about to say a word. Her eyes stare, and even this Jane must struggle to see because Peg’s features want to blur, rearrange themselves, refuse her gaze.
Did someone break in? Jane knows for certain she unlocked the door when she entered, and she certainly would have noticed if it had been forced. She glances around the room; it’s a horrible relief in a way she doesn’t want to admit, looking away from her friend’s lifeless body. The window is open a fraction. Wind slips through, biting cold. But it’s not enough of a gap for someone to get inside.
Unless whatever killed Peg isn’t human.
The thought drops, unwelcome, like a stone in Jane’s mind and sits there. Her thoughts are dull, sluggish, trying to move around it. She stares at the window, the gap, with a sense there’s something she’s forgotten. She should close the window; Peg will freeze when she returns. Then Jane remembers. She turns back to the thing on the bed, a choked sob rising in her throat.
It’s not as though she forgot—how could she forget? Except when she looks away, she does. Peg slides from her mind, because the thing on the bed isn’t Peg. It’s the absence of Peg. Peg has been utterly undone. Shaking, Jane puts a hand to her mouth. They’d promised to stick together, to have each other’s backs. They were supposed to protect each other, and Jane has utterly failed.
She keeps her eyes on Peg even as she bends mechanically to pick up the dropped pastry bag. She steps backward out the door, holding Peg in her sight as long as she can and fixing her in her mind so she doesn’t slip away again. In the kitchen, Jane finds the kettle nearly boiled dry and lifts it automatically from the heat, turning off the burner. She should call the police. There’s a telephone in the downstairs hall, but at the moment it feels impossibly far away. Jane’s body is heavy and all at once, all she wants to do is sleep.
Police. Scotland Yard. She will call. Eventually. She will. But right now, more than anything in the world, the only person she wants to talk to—despite everything between them, the broken promises and the lies, despite the wound that has been eight years healing and only managed to scab—the only person she can fathom talking to at all is her mother.