There was a tall, lanky man awaiting Freddy in her room. He smiled when she was wheeled in, the dark circles beneath his eyes lessening some.

“Well,” Trelawney sat and turned her attention to the small tea tray the nurse had left on the bureau, “we don’t need you rebelling right now. Tuberculosis is serious enough.”

“Yeah,” Freddy replied with a snort, her fingers automatically touching the long, thin scar on her chest.

“And moving through a mirror clear, that hangs before her all the year, shadows of the world appear,” she muttered, quoting Tennyson. “It’s like that…my dreams.”

“Pardon?” Crane took a step nearer and Freddy felt his presence shadowing her.

She pulled her robe tighter over her shoulders. “Wasn’t the Lady of Shalott a Seer?”

“I thought she was cursed,” he replied, his voice taut with uncertainty.
 

“So is that what this is all about?” Elliot took a long drag. “You’re gonna to ask the board of directors for more money. They’ll give it to you, I’m sure. You don’t have to beg. Don’t sweat it.”

Crane moaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “No, it’s not about the money, Elliot. It’s about the bodies down in the morgue and the patients we have clamoring for admittance and…”

“And that Professor Fotherby. Yeah. It’s about her too."
 
 

“Should be fun,” Freddy said, the muscles in her jaw tightening as she spoke to Crane.

God, this was awful. Just awful. She couldn’t go on like this. Couldn’t go on living in such, in such….in such what? Annoyance? Fear? Frustration? A combination of the three would do, she decided. Or maybe she was none of those things.

Maybe she was just….
 
 
 

Freddy had been a fool. A fool to think that some sense of indifference could exist between them. There was no accord of impassivity. No neutrality. No truce. She was very much in the same position she had been a few weeks ago when they stood together in front of his house and Crane had looked at her with heartbreak in his eyes.

Heartbreak. Yes, heartbreak.