Curtain Call at the Lantern

You laid it out slowly, the way you'd once laid out theory to a lecture hall: the dock tag, the school file, the records Jonah found. The speech Eddie left behind and the woman in it. The water tray. The green coat. The camera she knew how to avoid.

"Edwin Fenn couldn't have become Sir Edwin without you," you said. "And you couldn't have become Dr Crane without him. One of you was the other's proof. That speech at 9.30 wasn't a confession, Helena. It was a resignation letter from the two of you at once."

For a long moment nobody moved. Then Crane's shoulders came down half an inch and the polished BBC vowels went with them.

"He was going to stand up in front of six hundred people," she said, and her voice was Dockside, flat and worn, "and take the whole thing apart. Forty years I spent building that man. Every word. Every fork. He thought he could stop being him and it wouldn't cost me a thing." She looked at the stage. "I wasn't going to be Helen Craddock again. Not for anyone."

"You gave him something from his own medicine cabinet," you said. "In his own water."

"I gave him a quiet end," said Crane. "Better than the humiliation he had planned for both of us."

Rook was already walking up the aisle. Jonah didn't say a word. You had a moment left, and two ways to spend it.