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that feeling too, and all over again he was trying to persuade her to take the test, wanting to accompany her to the appointment, reminding her how his result had no bearing on hers, that chance was still fifty percent. She would be all right too…he just knew .
    Sometimes she felt that way too. Sometimes she felt the opposite. Neither feeling, she explained to him, had any basis in fact.
    Then Vik met Lesley, the children were born, and finally it seemed that Vik would allow Anna to go her own way.

5
    â€” ♦ —
    â€˜WE’RE IN OUR PYJAMAS WATCHING Mulan !’ Frankie’s voice was very loud in Anna’s ear, and brought with it the entire person, six years old, with blonde braids and huge eyes, greedy for life. ‘Daddy’s back at three. Mum’s painting the bathroom. Did you go shopping in Japan?’
    â€˜Maybe.’ The children jostled for possession of the phone. Sam, eighteen months younger, was the more serious of the two.
    â€˜I made a very exciting discovery yesterday. It must be a secret for now,’ she warned them.
    â€˜Sam,’ Frankie said. ‘Promise!’
    â€˜Yes,’ he said, after a pause. An enormous winged lizard, she told them. One of the biggest ever found.
    â€˜ How big?’ Frankie asked.
    â€˜Hmm… Its wings would stretch right across your living room and onto the patio. Its body might have been about your size, but lighter.’
    â€˜Will you be on TV again? When are you coming to see us? Mum—’ Frankie yelled, ‘it’s Anna!’ Then she was gone, but Sam remained on the line, not speaking but breathing heavily into the handset as if at any point he might. Then, suddenly, he dropped it onto the phone table.
    Anna felt almost normal as she showered and dressed.
    Downstairs, Lauren informed her that Mike and Colin had already checked out and were in what she called the breakfast patio: a bright room with French doors along one wall open onto a deck beyond. A hunched elderly couple sat opposite each other at one inside table; otherwise the room was empty. Mike and Colin were outside. As she stepped into the light Mike turned towards her and it felt as if all the air had been vacuumed from her lungs. As well as the lump across the bridge of his nose, his left eye had puffed up and turned blackish purple overnight; the eye itself was a livid red.
    She was going to say how sorry she was, but he cut across:
    â€˜I tripped on the stairs,’ he said. The mismatched eyes remained fixed on her for several moments before he looked down at his coffee cup. The asymmetry of his gaze made it impossible to read.
    Colin grinned and offered her a chair.
    â€˜Just how much did you two drink, now?’
    â€˜You’ve both missed your committee,’ Anna feigned a smile as she sat down, and noted a grosbeak bobbing about in the new growth at the far edge of the yard. ‘But you do have a good excuse.’ Colin nodded, mock-solemn.
    â€˜Yes. I dare say we won’t be fired this time. Just a detention, I expect…’
    Mike, unsmiling, stared out at the trees. Even so, she felt her shoulders relax: at least there was to be no scene, no shouting or fists pounding on the table, no spilled coffee or startled elderly guests watching through the French doors. Naturally, Mike was upset. He had come out of it worse than she had and was probably ashamed of himself too. But the important thing was what they’d found: the astounding specimen lying just a few miles from where they sat, which had died, passed through processes of burial, compression, and fossilisation, and then survived the slow collision of tectonic plates, the heaving up of once-submerged layers of the earth’s crust. It had lain underground while species became extinct and new ones flourished, while ice ages came and went. A river had carved a bed, revealing it, finally, to whichever human beings might pass by and be able to see what was