‘I’ll take three.’
He bags it all up and I walk back up Fifth Avenue. I buy a cup of tea and a pastrami sandwich for a homeless woman. I get three pepper spray canisters from Walgreens. There’s a pipe sticking up out of the middle of the road near Madison Square Park and it has steam pumping out. A chimney from the bowels of the earth.
In bed I scroll through my notifications: weather, natural disasters, political strife, anything connected to the US east coast. Nothing too troubling. I take a deep breath and start looking through KT’s secret emails.
Some of the messages are flirty and some of them are downright explicit. I read through a few dozen messages back and forth with several people who I assume are not Scott, before I come across one email from early May that does grab my attention.
It talks about helping to get rid of a neighbour from her apartment.
Then it goes on to the morning sex they had in the Park Hyatt, Chicago.
It talks about the breakfast they had in bed after, and how he was sorry.
It talks about the Little League game he had to leave for.
It talks about her term papers he had to grade.
Chapter 16
Next morning I email Professor Eugene Groot PhD from the discomfort of my narrow hostel bed. I introduce myself politely and ask if I could have half an hour of his time. That seems reasonable after he ignored my first message. I tell him I can travel up to Columbia to meet him at his office.
Mum and Dad are talking urns and coffins and flower choices, and it feels too distant from reality for me to comprehend. They want a mahogany urn that they can get engraved back home in Nottingham. They think it’ll be best to spread some of her ashes in the churchyard, probably just close family members in attendance, and then keep the rest in the urn to memorialise KT. I drift away and start imagining her autopsy scars, the rough Frankenstein stitches holding her lifeless body together, her skin cold and greying, and I have to physically shake the idea from my head. I’m nauseous. What kind of twisted mind do I have where I can visualise her like that? Visualise myself like that?
‘We can go to Pret if you like, Moll?’ says Dad.
‘Sure.’
We sit in the window of the Pret on West 42nd Street. Mum picks at a granola and fruit salad, and Dad and I both have pastries. Three cups of good, strong coffee. I saw an influencer on YouTube say you should never countenance visiting a chain restaurant in New York City because the one-off authentic places are so incredible here. The finest in the world. But I’m not that person. Mum and Dad are not those people. We lack that adventurous spirit. When Mum’s egg split into two, when it cleaved itself, all that bravery and spontaneity went to KT and left me like this.
Email notification. Eugene Groot apologises and says his schedule is busy until late February. Late February? He expresses his sincere condolences. I write back immediately that I have some important information relating to him and I’d like to discuss it, out of courtesy, before I take it to anyone else. I suggest Midtown or Columbia.
We gather our things together and head back out on to the street. Detective Martinez wants to talk with Mum again, just a formality, or so he says. Dad will take her there and wait outside.
Email notification. Groot says can I meet him at the Harvard Club on West 44th Street at six p.m. I reply that I will be there.
I do some shopping, then I walk alone to Central Park with my eyes peeled for anyone suspicious-looking. I have my hands inside my pockets because it’s a cold, crisp October day, and the guy in front of me is talking to his friend about the upcoming New York marathon. About the inconvenience of it all. The extra street security. His friend says You wait until Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade next month if you want to see inconvenience.
Inside the park an old Chinese man plays some kind of stringed instrument and his music is unlike anything I have ever heard. It is sad and it is beautiful.
I find the rock monoliths close to Inscope Arch, and perch on top, but not too close to the edge.
All around me is life. Layers of activity and noise; impossibly narrow skyscrapers building up behind the treeline like stalagmites in a limestone cave.
I try to wrap my head around KT’s death, and my new role as a surviving twin. How will I cope with that? How will it change my hopes and dreams? We will not have kids at the same age, the way we dreamed of. We will not marry in the same church the way we talked about. We will not holiday together with our husbands and our children in Cornwall as we always imagined we would do, drinking crisp white wine in some sleepy fishing harbour while our children devour their strawberry ice-creams.