I arrive at the hospital and my nose detects the alteration from one chemical smell to another. Lemon bleach to alcohol hand sanitizer, cleaning fluids to something more potent being pumped into my mum’s blood. Our landlady, Dominique, is sitting with Mum, her long gray hair giving her the look of a kindly witch. We wouldn’t have coped without Dom, especially since Mum’s MDS has developed into leukemia. The first day we moved into a tiny flat in Wembley, it was like Dom sensed we were a desperate little unit of two, in need of a crutch. She checks on Mum when I’m at work, takes her to chemo when I can’t, holds her hand till I arrive. There are good days sometimes, when we joke about the doctors or flip through magazines. But there are dark days too.

I have to keep going, have to put one foot in front of the other as I walk through this brightly lit ward. Mum is counting on me.

—

Another two years from this day, Mum will be dead. I will have nothing left, nobody to care for, and I’ll know the time has come to confess.

I’ll put it off, though. I’ll keep working hard, as many hours as I can get, leaving myself no time to think about the past. My bosses will promote me from cleaner to server, and then to the first-class lounge, recognizing me as someone who’s never off sick and never turns down a shift. Every day I’ll watch the travelers and wonder what it’s like to be them. Eventually this game of displacement will consume me and I’ll reinvent myself bit by bit as Stephanie Shaw, a name glimpsed on a boarding card during a transaction. A name that sounds like a character from a book.

“Stephanie Shaw” has always lived in London. She’s independent, lives alone by choice. Though it’ll break my heart to leave Dominique, I’ll move into a flat closer to the airport and one day I’ll make it official: I’ll legally become Stephanie Shaw. Kate Thomas will no longer exist.

Then, without meaning to, I’ll meet a man. I’ll be drawn toward him, sitting lost in his thoughts in the first-class lounge. Perhaps I’ll sense that, like me, he’s both a blank sheet and a labyrinth of secrets. I’ll fall for him so quickly I’ll barely know it’s happening, and I’ll let myself be happy for a while.

Then the guilt will return, even stronger. How can I lie in a comfortable bed, in this man’s arms, while Becca’s in prison? I’ll feel it again: the certainty that I have to turn myself in, and the fear of everything that will follow.

Because there’s still something only I know.