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“Christ,” Atta cursed on an exhale. She slid down the wall, sitting on the cold concrete. “She was only twenty-six.”

Murdoch hummed a note of acknowledgement. “She had her whole life ahead of her.”

Atta read on. She’d been right. The woman was separated from her husband. She’d filed three reports of violence against him. Look what that had gotten her. The opportunity to die and be cut open by a girl trying to prove herself in the academic world she didn’t even belong in.

After her third report, Patricia O’Malley was locked in a pantry, the kitchen gas on for ten hours. She was discovered one morning by a neighbour who was walking her dog near the woods and found Patricia bound by her ankles and wrists. Upon questioning, Patricia’s estranged husband admitted to killing her, tying her up, and dumping her body to make it look as if she’d been kidnapped.

Eyes misty, Atta read the last line of the report aloud. “Cadaver donated by the deceased’s family to Medical College, Morbid Anatomy Dept., Trinity College Dublin.”

She closed the file and set it on the ground beside her. She could feel Murdoch’s eyes on her, smell the scent of his cigarillo.

“Why are you here, Atta?”

She looked up at him. Felt something shift.

Things kept shifting.

“Why are you at Trinity?” he pressed quietly.

“Is the pursuit of academic excellence not enough?”

He smirked, and she hated it. Loved it. “No.” He dropped the cigarillo and twisted the ashes into the concrete with the toe of his shiny brown shoe. “Not when you make postmortem diagnoses and forensic deductions like you do and yet chooseBotanyfor your postgraduate studies.”

The clock tower bells rang in the distance as she looked at him and he at her. Then Atta gasped.

“Fuck!” She stood up, running a hand through her hair. “How is it 5 o’clock? I’m supposed to be at work!”

Professor Murdoch said nothing as she ran off.

Atta

12 October 1993

The next few weeks were a blur of lectures, assignments, cadavers, fetching Murdoch’s coffee, watching his students butcher their autopsies and one unfortunate trip to Achilles House.

“It’s all I’ve fecken got,”she’d groused at the Gold Stitch.

“I need one withflora. I thought I made that clear.”

“I’m not a dunce. I heard you, but I can’tmakeit happen.”

The leaves had all gone crimson and russet, the candles and confections cinnamon. Walking around campus was a fever dream of autumnal wonders and still, nearing the middle of October, she knew the charm had only just begun.

Professor Murdoch, on the other hand, had lost all of his charm.

“You marked these incorrectly.” He tossed a stack of essays at her.

Atta curled her lip at him but looked over the essays. She’d marked everything exactly the way he’d laid out in theextensivenotes he’d given once he finally agreed to let her help look over students’ work.

“This is exactly what you told me to do.”

He finally looked at her, most likely due to the insolence in her tone more than because of what she’d said. “You used a red pen.”

She blinked at him. “Red is the standard pen colour for making corrections.”

“Not in my courses.”

She looked at the anatomical rendering of a heart in front of him where he was correcting a student’s labelling. “You use blue.”