The Rift

They got back from Norwich the following evening, worn out, with a van full of new words — brother, niece, donor — and found Katherine at the kitchen table, where every document they'd found that week lay in neat stacks.

Florence understood at once: her sister had prepared. Arguments laid out point by point.

"Sit down," said Katherine. "Please."

She showed them the May letter. Florence read it, and a fury rose in her — hot, clean, unlike anything she'd ever felt. Derek had stolen three months with her son from Mum.

"We need to go to the police," Nigel said. "Today."

"I spoke to him yesterday," said Katherine. "He's offered a deal."

And she told them. Evenly, point by point. He tears up the agreement. They sell the house at market price through his agency. He keeps quiet about Thomas. They keep quiet about him.

When she'd finished, the kitchen was so quiet they could hear the drip of the tap Dad had never got round to fixing.

"You can't be serious," said Florence.

"Perfectly serious." Katherine folded her hands on the table. "Think about it, Flo. Court means a year, maybe two. Solicitors. Experts. We haven't got the money — I've given the last of mine to the bank. And meanwhile he goes to the papers. Thomas's name. Mum's. St Agnes'. Do you want Lily reading about her grandmother in the Kent Herald? Thomas's pupils—"

"I want him to pay for it!"

"So do I!" For the first time, Katherine raised her voice. "Do you think I don't? But I have to think not about what I want, but about what happens to the people this touches!"

"You always say that." Florence jumped up so fast the chair went over. "'I have to think.' 'Someone has to be responsible.' You just don't know any other way. You're terrified of anything getting out of control, and you'll give up anything at all, as long as it stays quiet!"

"Flo," Nigel said softly.

"No, let her say it." Katherine stood up too. "Go on, Flo. Say everything you think. You've had four years to prepare."

"Mum lived in silence for forty years!" Florence could hear her voice shaking and didn't care. "Forty years hiding him, because she was scared of what people would say. What we'd say. And you want us to do the same thing? Again? For Thomas to be a secret again, one nobody's allowed to mention because it's inconvenient?"

"Thomas himself doesn't want it made public!" Katherine reached for her bag. "Here. This is what he wrote to Mum."

She threw a small blue card onto the table.

Florence picked it up. Read it. "Please stop writing to me. You made your choice a long time ago. — T. B." Norwich, April 2016.

She raised her eyes to her sister.

"Where did you get this?"

Katherine went silent. Florence watched it dawn on her: she'd just given herself away.

"Where, Kat?"

"The loft." Katherine's voice was quieter now. "It fell out of the suitcase. On the first day."

"The first day." Florence repeated it as if the words were in a foreign language. "Four days ago. For four days we've been racking our brains about who Thomas Banks was, and you had this in your pocket."

"I wanted—"

"Wanted what? To protect us? From what? From the truth about our own mother?"

"I didn't know what to do with it!"

"You never know what to do with anything that won't fit in your columns!" Florence could hear herself shouting and couldn't stop. "You just hide it. Like Mum. You can't even see that you've turned into her — just without the love!"

Katherine went white, as if she'd been struck.

Nigel stepped between them.

"Enough. Both of you. Please."

"You agree with her?" Katherine turned to her brother. Her voice was trembling. "You think I'm—"

"I think you're wrong, Kat," Nigel said quietly. "Not about everything. But about this — yes. We can't hide Thomas away again. Yesterday I had the tests. For a match. If I'm a match, I'm giving him a kidney. And I'm not going to lie to people about why I'm having an operation. He's my brother. I'm not ashamed of it."

Katherine looked at him as though she were seeing him for the first time.

"You… what?"

"He's dying, Kat. The waiting list for a kidney is two to three years. He hasn't got two or three years."

Katherine opened her mouth. Closed it. Florence watched something break in her sister's eyes — the whole spreadsheet, her entire system of risks and consequences, which had no row for a brother giving a kidney to a man he'd only just met.

"Fine," Katherine said, very quietly. "Do what you like. Both of you. Go to court, go to the papers, go to the police. I'll sign my share of the house over to you if you want it. All I'm good for is counting, right? So I'll go and count. In London."

She picked up her bag. Mum's blue coat stayed on the back of the chair.

"Kat," said Nigel.

The door closed behind her. It didn't slam — Katherine never slammed doors. It just clicked shut, quietly, and that was worse.

The fury drained away, and in its place was something cold and sickening. Florence had just said the cruellest words of her life — to the person who had carried her round that loft when she was three.

"I'll go after her," said Nigel.

"No. Leave her. She'll come back." Florence wasn't sure that was true.

Nigel went out into the garden — through the window she watched him sit down on the bench among Mum's roses and bury his face in his hands.

Florence went into Dad's study and sat on the floor by the filing cabinet, the way the three of them had sat a few days before. She pulled out the third drawer, empty now.

And that was when she noticed.

The drawer was shallower than it should have been. Florence measured it with her hand from the outside, then from the inside — a difference of several centimetres. Anyone who wasn't looking would never have noticed.

She remembered the windowsill. Hinges hidden so carefully that only a joiner could have spotted them. Dad had loved his hiding places. For the person he was protecting.

Florence pressed on the bottom of the drawer in the far corner. It gave slightly. She caught the edge with a fingernail — and a thin wooden panel lifted out, revealing a shallow space beneath.

Inside lay a single envelope. Not yellowed — new, white, the kind they sell at the post office in packs of ten.

On it, in Mum's handwriting — firm, slanting to the right, a hand that didn't shake — was written:

"Katherine, Nigel, Florence. In case I don't manage to tell you myself."

The date in the corner: "16 August."

The day Mum died.