Chapter 26: The Doll

Tansy found me at the bakery under her loft at three o'clock.

I was eating a roll at the corner table with Maud and Ivo, and I was not hungry.

The lawyer had taken Hugh into a private office, and the institute staff had gone back to their desks, whispering.

Hugh was still in that office, with the door shut.

Tansy came in alone, with her ponytail undone and her cardigan buttoned wrong.

She stopped at our table and looked at all three of us.

"Can I sit?"

"No," said Maud.

"Let her," I said.

Tansy sat on the edge of the chair, holding a paper bag against her stomach.

"I need you to say something to the board tomorrow," she said.

"I'm listening."

"I need you to say I never wrote your sentences and never claimed to. That Hugh put my name on them."

"He did put your name on them."

"Then say it."

"I will say what happened."

"That's all I'm asking."

"You signed the survey as lead author, Tansy. You stood on a stage and said you wrote the protocol."

"He told me to."

"You told the donors."

"He told me he'd fix it with the money." Her voice shook. "I was twenty-four when I started, and he said I'd be famous."

I looked at her.

I had spent five years hating a woman who smiled in the front seat, and she had been a girl with a lab coat who wanted somebody to say she was good.

It changed nothing.

"You kept his watch in your kitchen drawer," I said. "You put his slippers by your bed."

"I know."

"You told him I was the clingy one. You told me you were sorry about it every time."

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