It was the lack of consequence that ate at her. Bad actions were supposed to come with penalties. That’s what the law prescribed. Even if it took three months to get a judgment, careering unbidden into an unrelated day, the judgment always came in the end. The beautiful order of this is what had made law so attractive to Sarah. It was what, at the bar in her mid-twenties, had finally set her free from sealed wood: justice. Designed neatly, if not always clearly, in the spirit at least of fairness and right. In court, she’d grown bold in her defence of this. Not that she’d been timid before. ‘Spitfire’, her university friends had called her, ‘Sarah Spitfire’, because she was inevitably the one who went to rallies, the one who called out the lecherous professor and in clubs slapped men’s hands away from bums, the one who started protests – a natural evolution of her family-ingrained sense of Right. Not daring at all.

Veronica wouldn’t have a clue what was ‘right’.

Sarah steadied herself with a deep breath and repaired Amelia’s reading book into her bag. Glancing over to the table, she found David watching her. David valued Right.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

When she and David had first met, he still wore his bar mitzvah ring. At Caius, they had both, individually, made the inevitable university discovery of a different sort of ring – crests worn on pinkies (usually by somebody named Figgy or Aubyn or Octavia) – the mark of the aristocrat, the Anglo-established, the land-entrenched. Until then, the only person Sarah had known who owned such a trinket was Veronica. Sarah had remembered her then, as she embarked on her university adventure, thinking how well she would have fitted in there, how quickly her slim limbs and blonde hair and magnetism would have enchanted and fooled them all. It was an apt time to remember her friend. Their shared, long ago summer had been the last time that boundaries seemed to blur, but now here Sarah was, away from her family and their mantras, away from the community she had been a part of, away from everything she thought she knew. Unchained and free.

Unlike some of the other North London boys who had come up to Cambridge with her, David did not disown the gold-embossed capital letters that spelled his initials and looped around his finger. It didn’t matter that next to the intricately engraved Oxford ovals of their new peers, his band seemed nouveau and gaudy. To David, it signified a choice he had made and an identity he had chosen – choosing to be one of the chosen; a semantic that Sarah of course loved. Back then, however, sitting in the Caius bar sometime during their second term, all she had observed was an interesting looking guy she had never noticed before. She remembered describing David this way to her friends – an interesting guy. It was a murky period of transition in which she was never sure whether to call people girls or women, boys or men, so she often landed on ‘guy’.