A couple of days later Anna was back at her counselling session. She'd given Olivia nothing new, being short with her answers. "Okay Anna I am going to be honest with you. I have had, dealings, with Professor Blackburn before." Months after being rescued from Stow and they had made precisely no 'progress'. Anna never went into details. Sometimes she enjoyed spinning ridiculous stories to watch Olivia hook on to them, and then her lips tighten with bitterness as she realised she had been taken for a ride. Olivia seemed to be trying a different tack today. "Anna, he and I do not exactly see eye to eye and the last thing I can see him as is a nurturing figure. I don't know if you have heard about what happened but a couple of years ago another pupil was, for want of a better word, accosted under Blackburn's supervision. The good Professor was frankly rather brutal and I believe I saw a very different side of him then. I cannot believe that you spent the amount of time you have with him and have not seen this. Please Anna, tell me, do you know what I mean?" Anna stared at her. This was it, this was the brink. She could tell her, spill everything, it was on the tip of her tongue. But she wouldn't, she knew that. Maybe one day she would get incredibly drunk, or be so full of tears she would spill it all, she desperately wanted to tell her, but she couldn't. There was too much at risk. Anna's worst fear was that she would never tell. That in ten years' time she would still have these secrets, weighing her down. Unable to say a thing.
A thought struck her. Olivia had said Blackburn had accosted a pupil. She could only be talking about Tom Raines! She was there! She knew. That side of him, she had seen it. Importantly, she would believe her and could protect her! She had to say something. "Well he isn't, I mean, he isn't the friendliest of people, that's for sure. He believes ends justify the means and everything else is a distraction. But he isn't physically cruel for the sake of it, emotionally maybe but otherwise he has a reason for things." Her breath stopped, reality flooding back to her as she realised what she had said. She had gone too far, revealed too much! How could she think she could ever tell Olivia about it? What had she been thinking? In desperation Anna tried to back track. "Sorry I meant he um, isn't always emotionally available. We were there for a long time and we never talked about feelings or whatever. That was all I meant. I shouldn't have used the word cruel, sorry I am really tired, I didn't really know what I was saying." Anna was on edge, using her usual excuse of being tired to divert suspicion. Most people would have accepted it but not Olivia. At first Anna had almost hoped that she would let something slip and Olivia would not believe excuses and would pursue her until the truth came out. But in that moment, when it was actually happening, Anna would have given almost anything in the world to take back her words and quell suspicion. But Olivia kept pressing. Anna, seeming increasingly dubious and shifty as she fought to undo the damage her words had done, refusing to answer questions ("what do you mean he was emotionally cruel?" "What did he do in order to reach his ends?"), ended up looking incredibly guilty. She knew there was no way out of this line of questioning. In the end the tears won out and she sobbed out, in short sharp breaths, everything. The murder, the humiliation.
At the end of it Anna shrank back, trying to distance herself from what she had just done. To escape from reality for even just a second. Olivia's skin was pale, a horrified pallor by the time Anna had finished talking in between her sporadic tears. "Right, um Anna I am so sorry" she uttered, her voice a breath in a storm. "I had no idea." Suddenly she almost shook herself and straightened. "We need to think about what we are going to do about this. We can't go to Marsh, he's in Blackburn's pocket. He wouldn't intervene when Tom was strapped to that machine, we can't count on him to do so now."
She paused for breath. "Let me think about this, about what is best to do. You did the right thing. Legally you must understand, I am obligated to protect you and tell the authorities but with a situation like this I think I need to think about how best to do that. I'm afraid I cannot say nothing now even if you change your mind. But don't worry, you will be safe from that monster – and you did the right thing in coming to me."
Anna felt sick. Physically nauseous. She had made a horrible mistake. He would kill her. She tried to take it all back, say it was a joke, say anything and everything to make Olivia not tell. She said she would deny it, had begged and pleaded, a knot forming in her stomach. She would have given anything to go back in time an hour and not tell her a thing. But she couldn't. It was over. Olivia knew and she was very firm. Whether Anna denied it or not there would be an investigation and the truth would come out. Olivia had more trust in the system than Anna. She left the room, eyes rubbed raw with tears as she made her way towards the room she shared with Daisy.
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