She didn’t, not at first. Instead she went back into the bathroom and spent almost an hour standing in the cramped shower cubicle, at first washing and thoroughly cleaning her hair with detergents of a quality unimaginable in New Britain, even for the rich—then just standing there, staring at her feet beneath a rain the temperature of blood, wondering if she’d ever feel clean again. Thinking about the expression on Roger’s face when he’d been ready to murder a secret policeman for her, and about Burgeson’s kindly face, high ideals, and low friends. Friends who believed fervently in political ideals Miriam took for granted, and who were low subversives destined for the gallows if Smith and his friends ever caught up with them. Gallows where whoever had kidnapped or murdered Iris belonged—and that in turn led Miriam to think about her mother and how little time she’d spent with her in the past year, and how many questions she’d never asked. And more questions for Roland, and his face as he’d turned away, hurt by her rejection; a rejection he didn’t understand because it wasn’t anything personal, it was a rejection of the world he would unintentionally lock her into, rather than the person he was.

Miriam had lots of things to think of—all of them bleak.

She finished with the shower in much the same black mood she’d been in that fateful evening when she’d first opened the locket and unhitched a mind-gate leading to a world where things turned out to be paradoxically worse. Why bother? She wondered. Why do I keep going? True love would be a great answer if she believed in it. But she was too much the realist: While she’d love to find Roland in her bed and fuck him senseless—the need for him sometimes brought her awake from frustrated dreams in the still small hours—there wasn’t a cozy little cottage for two at the end of that primrose path. Miriam had held her daughter in her arms, once, twelve years ago, kissed her on the head and given her up for adoption. Over the next few years she’d spent nights agonizing over the decision, trying to second-guess the future, to decide whether she’d done the right thing.

The idea of bringing another child, especially a daughter, into the claustrophobic scheming of the Clan filled her with horror. She was a big girl now, and the idea of expecting a man to protect her didn’t strike her as cool. That wasn’t what she’d gone through pre-med and college and divorce and most of med school and the postgraduate campus of hard knocks for. But facing all this on her own was so daunting that sometimes it made her lie awake wondering if there was any point.