On Brook Street, before she could think any more, she went straight for the red door, trying the knocker first, its welded solidity jarring her fingers. She prodded the call buttons on the keypad and, not hearing any answering buzz or motion inside, hammered on the wood with her knuckles. No response; her showdown wasn’t going to happen. If she scurried home, tail between her legs, she would deflate, be gnawed at by the failure, the pointlessness, her lack of any capacity to act. This was what she was here to redress: powerlessness. A decade’s worth of being made invisible by a hostile system, the diminishment of her creative, expansive mother to zero by this relentless, abrasive status quo. Worthing was a human point of contact in this murderous system and she had to carry this through.

She’d wait.

Feeling exposed to the channelled wind and squalling rain and the watching eyes out on the pavement, she let herself in through the unlocked garden gate around the corner and took up a position in a small, neglected gazebo at the bottom of the garden. Although the previous night’s rain had deposited another layer of slick, cold leaves onto the sludge on the sodden wood, Petra sat flat onto the floor and hugged her knees to her chest, watching the window. It was around noon but under the overcast sky it might have been dusk, and the studio was dark. A rat poked through the garden fence and rooted around the base of some cheerless daffodils as Petra pulled out her phone and looked at Vincent’s name.

She thought better of it, huddled in the cold and waited.

For the past several days, she hadn’t allowed herself to think beyond the double death of her mother, and the immediate ripples of the manipulative shocks she’d experienced at the Fallout Ball. But now that she had the time and the silence, she started to consider Olivia and Rashida’s story, to humanise the monsters. Petra had quit denying that it was all true; it was easier to just give in and believe: the women were dead, their story was a tragedy. She imagined them as young women, the hope of a future laid out before them: Olivia from the complacent classes, and Rashida having grafted her way to her awkward place at Beauchamp. They would have fallen viscerally in love, a difficult truth in those bitter, judgemental years of arch conservatism, but they would have found light and inspiration in each other. Only to have it broken by some entitled men, acting just as entitled men were always trained to act – diminishing and crippling creativity and idiosyncrasy. Worthing and his friends had killed their love and their potential, and they deserved what they got.