Chapter 1: The Last Supper
The gin in my martini was so cold it hurt my teeth, a sharp, bracing pain that felt more honest than anything else in the room. I took another sip, letting the chill spread through me, a feeble counterbalance to the feverish secret burning a hole in my clutch purse. Next to my lipstick and keys, a slim plastic stick, its digital display smugly declaring ‘3+’, sat like a concealed detonator.
Across the private members’ club, the grand fireplace crackled, casting jumping shadows over the faces of men who decided things. Mycroft had chosen our usual corner, a plush velvet cavern swallowed by dimness. His hand rested on my thigh, his fingers tracing slow, possessive circles through the silk of my dress. It was his ritual, a silent claim staking. I used to find it thrilling. Now, it just felt heavy.
“You’re quiet tonight, Jill.” His voice was a low murmur, bypassing my ear and going straight to my nervous system. He didn’t look at me, his icy grey eyes scanning the room, cataloguing exits and entrants with a single glance.
“Long shift,” I said, my own voice smooth, a polished lie. “A four-car RTA just as I was leaving. It was… messy.” That part was true. The coppery smell of blood seemed to have woven itself into my wild frizzy hair, a stark contrast to the club’s aroma of aged whiskey and cedar.
“Yet you came.” His thumb pressed inward, a subtle increase of pressure. “I’m flattered.”
“I wanted a drink.” I tilted my glass, watching the olive bob. “And you do keep the good stuff.”
A faint smile touched his lips. It never quite reached his eyes. They remained analytical, assessing. “You’re trembling.”
“Am I?” I was. A fine, constant vibration deep in my muscles, the adrenaline of the shift mixing with the tectonic fear of my own body. He mistook it. Of course he did.
He leaned closer, his dark auburn curls catching the firelight. He smelled of sandalwood and crisp linen, a scent that had once made my head swim. Now, it just made me calculate the distance to the door. “Let’s bypass the rest of the evening’s tedious social obligations,” he breathed, his charm a tool he wielded with surgical precision. “The car is outside. We could be at the flat in twelve minutes.”
His meaning was clear. The circular motion on my thigh became a line drawn upward. A promise. The sex was, and always had been, sensational. A physical conversation where our intellects finally shut up and our bodies took over. It was the one part of this arrangement I would miss. The only part.
It was also the last thing I should do. A clean break, that was the plan. Announce it was over, finish my drink, walk out. Don’t look back. Don’t get dragged into his bed, into his orbit, one more time.
But the want was a physical ache, separate from the turmoil in my mind. A final memory to take with me. A sovereign decision, my own, for my own pleasure. Not his.
I turned my head. Our faces were inches apart. “Twelve minutes? You’re slowing down, Mycroft.”
His eyes flickered, a spark of genuine reaction. He liked a challenge. “Ten, if traffic obeys.”
I drained the rest of my martini, the bitterness fortifying me. I placed the glass down with a decisive click. “Prove it.”
The ride was silent, efficient. His driver knew better than to speak. Mycroft’s hand remained on my knee, a casual brand. I stared out at the blur of London lights, my mind a flat, blessed blank. Don’t think. Just feel. For one last time.
His apartment was predictably minimalist, ruthlessly clean, and cold. No photographs, no clutter. A place for everything, and everything in its place. I was the only anomaly. He didn’t turn on the main lights, just a single lamp that cast a pool of gold on the vast, empty sofa.
“Drink?” he asked, moving to the sideboard.
“No.”
He paused, then turned. In the low light, he looked more like a statue, all sharp angles and controlled power. “All business tonight, then.”
“Isn’t it always?”
He crossed the space in three strides. His hands came up to frame my face, his touch cool. He studied me, his gaze searching for something. He saw the fatigue, the residual stress from A&E. He did not see the fundamental shift, the cell-deep alteration. He kissed me, and it was like striking a match. The familiar heat roared to life, immediate and consuming. My brain switched off. My body arched into his.
It was brutal and perfect. On the cool, expensive sheets of his bed, in the silent dark of his sterile palace, we spoke a language that needed no words. He was demanding, meticulous, devastatingly thorough. I met him with a frantic, focused energy, as if I could outrun my own thoughts. For those minutes, I did. There was no past, no future. Only the slick slide of skin, the crush of weight, the gasp of air. A perfect, finite equation.
Afterward, the quiet was absolute. My heartbeat pulsed in my ears, slowing. The reality, dampened for a while, began its seep back in. I felt the slight, unfamiliar tightness low in my abdomen, a secret he’d just jostled. I slipped from the bed before the usual languor could set in.
“Going somewhere?” His voice came from the darkness, lazy and satiated.
“Shower. I’m on an early.” The lie came easily now.
I stood under the scalding water, scrubbing his smell from my skin. The steam couldn’t wipe away the clarity that was now crashing down. I had done it. I had taken my last hit. Now for the withdrawal.
When I emerged, wrapped in his ridiculously soft towel, he was propped against the headboard, watching me. The lamp was on now. His post-coital glow was already cooling back into that watchful, calculating calm. The Iceman, reforming.
“Come back to bed,” he said. It wasn’t a request.
“I can’t.” I found my clothes, dressed with my back to him. Each piece felt like armor.
“This petulance is unusual, Jill. Did I miss a cue?” His tone was light, but there was an edge there. A hint of someone not getting the script they’d written.
I turned, zipping my dress. I met his gaze, forcing my own to be steady, neutral. Consultant’s eyes. “This isn’t working for me anymore, Mycroft.”
He went very still. A different kind of stillness. “I see. Elaborate.”
“There’s nothing to elaborate. It’s been… diverting. But I’m done.”
A faint, cold smile. “Diverting. How very me of you to put it that way. You’re upset about something else. The traffic? The vermouth in your martini? Tell me, and I’ll have it fixed.”
That was him. A problem to be solved. A mood to be managed. I almost laughed. “You can’t fix this. I’m just… bored.”
The word landed like a slap. His eyebrows lifted a millimeter. Boredom was a mortal sin in his world. “I find that difficult to believe.”
“Believe what you like.” I shoved my feet into my heels, grabbed my clutch. The pregnancy test within it felt like a lead weight. “This is over. Don’t call me. Don’t send a car. Just… leave it.”
I walked out of the bedroom, my footsteps echoing on the polished floor. He didn’t follow. He would never chase. It was beneath him.
The elevator ride down was endless. The grand lobby was deserted. Only when the night air, thick with city damp, hit my face did I let out the breath I was holding. It shook. I hailed a cab, my body suddenly feeling hollowed out and aching.
As the cab pulled away from the curb, I looked up at the façade of his building. His floor was dark. He was probably already on the phone, dismissing me from his thoughts, solving some minor international crisis to soothe his pride.
I leaned my head against the cool glass. It was done. I had my final memory. Now, I had everything else to face. Alone. My hand drifted to my stomach, flat and unknowing beneath the silk. The trembling started again, deep and unstoppable, this time with no gin, and no him, to blunt it.
The trembling started again, deep and unstoppable, this time with no gin, and no him, to blunt it. I clenched my hands into fists in my lap, the nails biting into my palms. Focus on the facts. You are a doctor. This is a physiological response to adrenaline and hormonal fluctuation. Breathe. But beneath the clinical detachment, a raw panic, animal and sharp, clawed at my ribs. What the hell was I going to do?
The cab dropped me at my Marylebone flat. It felt less like a home and more like a carefully curated set piece. Tasteful art, ergonomic furniture, everything chosen for efficiency and a certain detached elegance. It was the flat of someone who had their life entirely under control. The irony was a bitter pill. I walked to the fridge, poured a glass of water, and took the prenatal vitamins I’d bought that morning, swallowing them down with the cold certainty of a prisoner.
Sleep was a fragmented thing. I dreamed of fireplaces and falling.
The next week passed in a blur of autopilot. Work was a salvation. In A&E, other people’s crises drowned out my own. The screams, the blood, the frantic beeping of monitors—it was a symphony of urgent, solvable problems. I stitched, I intubated, I pronounced. My voice remained steady, my hands rock-solid. No one saw the secret simmering beneath my scrubs.
My own life, however, required surgery.
I called an estate agent. The polished man in the too-sharp suit barely glanced at the contents, just the square footage and the postcode. “Excellent property. We’ll have offers in days.” Next, a storage company. My belongings, the artifacts of my London self, were reduced to numbered boxes in a warehouse off the North Circular. The books, the art, the ridiculously expensive coffee machine Mycroft had once commented was ‘excessively Italian’—all catalogued and shrouded in bubble wrap. It felt less like packing and more like an erasure.
I accepted a post as a Senior Registrar in the Emergency Department at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. The interview was a formality; they were desperate for experienced staff. The head of department, a blunt Yorkshireman named Dr. Armitage, peered at me over his glasses during the video call. “You do know it rains here, lass? And it’s not that kind of rain you get down south. It’s a horizontal, philosophical rain.”
“I grew up in Northumberland,” I said, my refined accent feeling suddenly out of place. “I’m familiar with the rain.”
He gave a curt nod. “Good. We’ll see you in a month.”
I packed up my life in London, put my flat up for sale and prepared to move to Newcastle. I hadn’t told my parents of my relocation, not sure how to broach the subject with them in our ancestral seat outside of Corbridge. The Tallentire family seat, a draughty stone heap called Rowan Park, was less a home and more a monument. My father, a retired High Court judge, held court there. My mother, a former opera singer, treated life like a continuous, slightly disappointing performance. “London Medicine,” my father had said with a definitive nod when I got the consultant post, as if he’d personally ordained it. A retreat north would be seen as a step down. A failure. And the pregnancy? That would be a scandal of operatic proportions. I could hear my mother’s dramatic sigh already, see the cold disappointment in my father’s eyes. No. Not yet.
My phone buzzed on the kitchen island, now bare except for a lone packet of biscuits. A name flashed on the screen: Mycroft. The trembling threatened to return. I let it go to voicemail. A few minutes later, a text arrived. Not a question. An observation.
The estate agent’s board has gone up outside your building.
I didn’t reply. He wouldn’t ask why. He would deduce, investigate, and know within hours. The thought sent a chill through me that had nothing to do with the empty flat. He was the one variable my carefully constructed escape couldn’t fully account for.
The final morning dawned grey and damp. My suitcase, containing only essentials, stood by the door next to a single box of medical texts I’d need immediately. The flat was an echo chamber. I ran my hand over the cold marble of the countertop. This was it. Running away? Maybe. But sometimes a strategic retreat is the only sane move.
I locked the door, posted the keys through the agent’s letterbox, and took the tube to King’s Cross. The train north was crowded, but I’d booked a silent carriage. As London’s grimy outskirts gave way to green fields and sharper light, I placed a hand on my abdomen. The faintest curve was beginning to harden under my palm. A line had been drawn. Whatever came next—the new job, the new city, the relentless northern rain, the looming confrontation with my family—I would face it alone.
But not quite.
The train plunged into a tunnel, and in the sudden, rattling darkness, I felt it: a tiny, fluttering quickening, deep inside. A sign of life asserting itself. It wasn’t a feeling of joy. It was more primal than that. A claim. An undeniable fact.
My child, and mine alone, was coming. And Mycroft Holmes, the Iceman in his gilded labyrinth, knew nothing about it. Yet.
The flutter came again, a soft brush against my insides, like a moth trapped behind velvet. I kept my hand pressed flat against the wool of my coat, as if I could commune with it through the layers. It felt less like a hello and more like a reminder. I’m here. You are not alone in this. The train emerged into the wan northern light, and I let my hand fall back to my lap.
King’s Cross to Newcastle upon Tyne is roughly three hours. Three hours to shed one skin and prepare for another. I spent the first hour ignoring the three missed calls from a number I didn’t recognize but knew intuitively was him, testing the boundaries of my disappearance. The second hour drafting a resignation email from my London post, cold and professional, citing ‘a unique career opportunity’ with no further details. The third hour watching the Durham cathedral appear and vanish, a solid stone promise of history I was now running toward, not away from. That’s what I told myself. I wasn’t fleeing. I was executing a well-planned strategic relocation.
My new flat was in Jesmond, a ten-minute walk from the hospital. The estate agent had emailed photos: beige walls, beige carpet, a modular grey sofa. It looked like a showroom for a life that hadn’t happened yet. The key was under a flowerpot by the entry door, as instructed. The air inside was cold and smelled faintly of bleach and vacancy.
I dropped my suitcase in the middle of the living room. The sound echoed. No bookshelves, no art, just the neat, empty shell of something. I walked to the large window. The view was of a rain-slicked street, red-brick terraces, and a row of bins. It was aggressively ordinary. It was perfect.
Work started the next day. The Royal Victoria Infirmary’s A&E department was a different species of chaos than London’s. The volume was similar, but the tone was sharper, bleaker. The ailments carried the weight of a post-industrial landscape: industrial accidents, falls from scaffolding, fights outside clubs, and a pervasive, crushing sense of poverty that no amount of NHS funding could fully bandage. The staff moved with a gritty, dark-humoured efficiency.
Dr. Armitage met me at the nurses' station, a clipboard clamped under his arm. “Tallentire. You made it through the philosophical rain, I see.”
“It was more of a mist,” I said.
“Aye, well, wait for January.” He eyed me up and down, not lecherously, but as if assessing a piece of equipment. “Right. You’re on with Kat today. She’ll show you where we hide the decent coffee. Try not to look so… London. It puts the patients off.” He walked away, his white coat flapping.
Kat was a staff nurse in her fifties with a severe grey bun and eyes that had seen everything twice. She handed me a lanyard. “Consultant, eh? They usually last six months before they scuttle back south. What’s your damage?”
“I needed a change,” I said, clipping the ID to my scrubs.
“Change,” she snorted, leading me down a corridor. “We get a lot of that here. Usually in the form of loose change, rattling in pockets.” She pushed through some double doors into Resus. “Welcome to the war.”
The first major case was a motorcyclist vs. lorry. The bike had lost. We fought for forty-seven minutes, a symphony of shouted commands, the hiss of the ventilator, the rhythmic thump of chest compressions. His leathers were cut away, revealing a tattoo of a dragon on a pale, crashing chest. The dragon rose and fell with our efforts. I was lining up for a central line when a wave of nausea, hot and sudden, washed over me. The metallic smell of blood mixed with the antiseptic spray triggered a salivating rush. I swallowed it back, a bitter acid burn at the base of my throat.
“You alright, pet?” Kat muttered, not looking up from the airway.
“Fine. Light-headed. Didn’t eat.” The lie was automatic.
“See you don’t faint. We’ve enough to mop up.”
We pronounced him at 11:17. The dragon was still. I walked out of Resus, my hands steady but my insides quivering. In the staff loo, I splashed cold water on my face and stared at my reflection in the scratched metal mirror. Pale. Dark circles under the grey eyes. A stranger wearing my face.
The rest of the shift was a blur of stitches and sprains and a toddler who’d swallowed a two-pence piece. The mundanity was a relief. It required no emotional output, just competence. Kat watched me, her expression unreadable.
At the end of the shift, she followed me into the locker room. “You’re pregnant,” she said, not a question. She was pulling off her trainers.
I froze, my hand on the lock. “What?”
“Seen it a thousand times. That particular shade of green in Resus. The way you avoid the anti-nausea tabs even though we all raid them. You’re about… fourteen, fifteen weeks?”
I said nothing, which was confirmation enough.
“Husband? Partner?” she asked, blunt as a hammer.
“No.”
“Right.” She pulled on a thick wool coat. “Well, you’ll be showing soon. The lads here are mostly alright, but Armitage is a prick. Thinks women consultants are ticking time bombs. You’ll want to tell him before he works it out for himself. He hates surprises.”
“Thank you for the advice,” I said, my voice stiff.
“Wasn’t advice. It was a forecast.” She turned at the door. “The first scan’s at the RVI too, you know. Might see you in the queue.”
She left. The silence in the locker room was total. I leaned my forehead against the cool metal of the locker. So much for secrets.
The walk back to the flat was cold. The philosophical rain had begun, a fine, persistent drizzle that soaked through everything. My phone buzzed in my pocket. Another unknown number. Then a text appeared, not from the unknown number, but from my own mother.
Darling, your father and I are hearing the most curious whispers from London. That you’ve left your post? That the flat is sold? Call me. Immediately.
The second text followed a moment later.
And why on earth would Mycroft Holmes be calling us looking for you? He was most insistent. What have you done, Jillian?
The rain dripped off my nose, onto the screen. The words blurred. So he hadn’t just deduced. He was actively hunting. Of course he was. I was a loose end, and Mycroft Holmes despised loose ends. I had presented myself as a simple, solvable equation, and now I had introduced a radical, irrational variable. He wouldn’t rest until he solved for it.
I looked up at the grey sky, the endless drizzle masking the world. The quickening happened again, a soft, insistent poke from within. I’m still here, it said.
I put a hand over my coat, over the tiny, hardening curve.
“I know,” I said aloud, to the rain, to the city, to the life inside me. “I know.”
I unlocked the door to the beige flat. It was still cold. It still smelled of bleach. But it was mine. I took out my phone, stared at my mother’s text, and then at the final missed call from the unknown number.
I powered the phone off. The screen went black, a tiny, private rebellion. For tonight, he couldn’t reach me. For tonight, the only heartbeat that mattered was the one I could finally feel echoing quietly beneath my own, a second, secret rhythm in the silent, beige dark.