Page 32 of The Half Sister

The motion of the train is making Kate feel sick, its rhythmic movement matched by her swaying reflection in the window opposite. It’d probably be best to focus on something else, something still, but every time she looks down to read her book, the words swim on the page.

She closes her eyes and the nausea immediately subsides, until she remembers the jabbing of a needle into the inside of her arm, as the nurse had struggled to find a juicy enough vein to draw blood from. Kate’s hand instinctively goes to the site, her fingers able to feel the ball of cotton wool that is taped over the puncture through the fabric of her jacket.

‘It’s not normally this difficult,’ the nurse had commented as she’d tried, and tried again, to tap a vein into action. ‘It’s probably because you’re slim.’

Kate refrained from saying that only a bad workman blamed his tools. She’d had enough blood tests to know thatshewasn’t the problem.

It had only been two weeks since the embryo transfer, but it had felt like a month – a year even, as she’d spent every second wondering whether she might be pregnant. Yet in just a few short hours, Kate will find out one way or another, and whatever the outcome, she knows that she’s in this moment, the right here and now, for the last time. Because whether sheisorisn’t, she’s not going through this again.

‘Nice of you to join us,’ Lee, her editor, calls out, as she walks into the open-plan office twenty minutes later. ‘We’re going into conference in five.’

She waves a nonchalant hand in the air. ‘Okay guys,’ she says, in a hushed tone to the three reporters on the desks facing hers. ‘What have we got?’

Her team run through some potential stories, but it’s all pretty thin gruel: a sacked manager; a couple of film premieres that evening; a soap star walking their dog. Daisy, the intern, has picked up on an interview in an American magazine, where an A-list actress admits to having had cosmetic surgery.

‘Mmm,’ says Kate, thinking on her feet. ‘So let’s pull the article, rewrite it and get some photos through the years? I’ll offer it up as a picture-led spread.’

‘Sure,’ says Daisy, all too eagerly, and Kate can’t help but love her for it.

‘Two minutes!’ barks Lee.

Kate hastily collects today’s celebrity magazine spreads that are strewn across her desk and flicks through them as she makes her way to the boardroom. In the absence of a strong lead story, she’s got one more option up her sleeve.

‘So, what have you got, Kate?’ asks Lee, once they’ve decided that a surprise announcement from the Home Secretary isn’t enough for a front page of its own.

‘Well, it’s a bit left field and it might be something the features team want to take up, but police in the States are using a new tactic to catch criminals.’

‘Is this where they’re uploading a suspect’s DNA to genealogy websites?’ questions Lee.

‘Yeah, that’s the one,’ says Kate.

‘I like the story, but it doesn’t work for the front page, unless your desk has found a celebrity element to it? Any of the crimes in or around LA?’

Kate nods. ‘I can look into it.’

‘Great, if we can find a celebrity connection, it might make a splash. Do we know of anyone famous who wasalmosta victim in one of these crimes? Maybe a celebrity’s parent knows one of the guys they’ve caught using this method? Were friends with him? Maybe their kid played with his kid – that kind of thing.’

Kate’s heart drops, not just at the enormity of the task, but because she just doesn’t have the appetite for this kind of journalism anymore. She wants to report on stories that matter, not the tenuous links between a suspected murderer and the parents of someone who was once onThe Voice.

She feels a bubbling sensation in the pit of her tummy and smiles knowingly to herself, hoping that maybe it won’t be too long before she can take a break from both.

‘Okay, so follow the celebrity lead, Kate, and Lara, maybe you can run alongside to develop the true crime element or see if you can find a strong real-life example of how Joe Bloggs is using an ancestry website to find his long-lost mother or something.’

Kate can’t help but flinch as Lara, the features editor, nods enthusiastically and jots a note down on her pad.

‘That’s all,’ says Lee, standing up. ‘Back to work.’

Despite having tons to do, Kate finds herself daydreaming for the rest of the day, unable to concentrate on the simplest of things. Even Karen, her deputy, telling her about a Tinder date she had last night, which Kate is usually keen to hear about, leaves her bored and uninterested. The minutes feel like hours as the clock ticks slowly towards four o’clock, the time she can ring the clinic for the results. Yet as soon as her phone displays 16.00, she suddenly feels reluctant to call, knowing that once she does, she will no longer be in limbo. If she doesn’t get the answer she wants, she’d now almost prefer to be in this state of uncertainty, where there’s still a chance that her life is about to change. Where she can dare to believe that this time next year, she’ll be out of this job, holding her longed-for baby with another twelve months separating her from her father’s passing.

She knows that the pain of losing him will never leave her, but as each week comes and goes, a tiny part of her starts to heal. Sometimes she can almost feel herself being sewn back together again – as if a needle is darning the holes that have been left by his death. Yet now, with Jess turning up, it feels as if they’re all about to be unpicked again.

Kate takes her phone and grabs a tissue from her handbag, knowing that whichever way this phone call goes, she will probably need one. She walks through the office painstakingly slowly, almost willing someone to stop and talk to her – anything to hold off the inevitable for a few more minutes. Even Stan, the normally-chatty post guy, who she bumps into on the way out of the building, lets her pass without comment.

‘Bloody typical,’ she says out loud, as she walks through a throng of smokers adding to the already polluted streets of E14. She holds her breath as the clouds of smoke billow around her, forcing her to step off the kerb. A black cab toots its horn and she holds up an apologetic hand. She has to apologize again when the cabbie pulls over next to her, thinking she’s hailed him.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I don’t need...I was just...’ He tuts and joins the line of traffic again.

She hopes that once she’s made this call, her brain will return to its usual levels of awareness.

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