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‘I never want to hear that man’s name again,’ Vivien said.
‘Okay, but I just—’
‘It’s done. We don’t need to talk about it any further.’
Audrey stayed silent. She saw the misery in her mother’s eyes, and it crushed her to know she was the person who had caused it. She had taken every man her mother had ever loved away from her.
Over the next few days, she watched Vivien retreat into herself, getting quieter, paler, thinner. She noticed her mother could hardly look her in the eye. That day in the gallery played out over and over in her mind, especially at night. The more she thought about it, the more she doubted herself. She found herself wishing Benedict had grabbed her, that he’d done something indisputable. The feeling that she might have been wrong, that she had overreacted, was almost unbearable.
When the morning of the maths exam came, she hadn’t slept for two nights in a row. She was so wired, she nearly got herself run over getting to the exam venue. As she sat at the narrow wooden desk, looking around at the other students, her palms began to sweat. When the invigilator told them to begin, she turned over the exam paper, and her eyes swam as she flicked through the pages. She couldn’t see one question that she could answer. Her hands began to shake as she reached for her bottle of water on the desk, hoping it might combat the growing wave of nausea threatening to envelop her. She closed her eyes and just tried to breathe.
Sometime later, she sat up, managed to collect herself enough to focus. She worked her way through the first section, breaking each question down into its component parts, but her mind felt muddled, like she was thinking through sludge and before she was even a quarter of the way through the paper, her time was up. She walked out of the exam hall in tears. She did not turn up to the next exam. She gave up the idea of studying Astronomy at university. She had tried and failed at too many things. Some burning fire of self-belief had been extinguished.
