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April had seen death before. 

 Her grandmother, calm and still after years of sickness and torment. Her mum hadn’t wanted her to see, had told her to wait in the Costa coffee downstairs and help Mattie keep an eye on Leo and Hannah. 

She hadn’t.

Morbid curiosity mixed with disbelief, and she’d ducked away when Mattie was distracted by one of the twins’ infamous scuffles. Her canvas pumps had squeaked as she walked, mostly unnoticed by the busy hospital staff, those that did assuming she belonged. To this day, the smell of disinfectant took her back there – peering through the crack in the door, hospital staff in pressed and starched uniforms unplugging and wheeling away the machines that had been hooked into her granny for months at that point, so long April could hardly remember what she looked like without them. 

 Gone were the tubes and the wires now though, the machine that had been her heart, and the one that had been her lungs wheeled away, chords wrapped around a leg, ready to keep somebody else’s Granny Jane alive. When April’s eyes finally fell upon the figure lying in the bed, it was as if a screen had been pulled away, and suddenly, she saw her granny for what she’d been all along.

 She’d looked so unbearably small, all alone in that bed, and April couldn’t think of anything better to do than cry. 

She hadn’t cried when she saw Jerry. Face bloated and pale, fingers slack in the arms of his chair, pink fidget spinner, abandoned, lying on the floor where it’d fallen. She hadn’t cried, because all she’d wanted was to run to the bathroom down the hall and heave her guts up. 

 April had seen death before, but never like this.

 Death had been old and peaceful, not young and violent. Death left smiling pictures of your loved one before they’d gotten too old and sick [i]to[/i] smile, not videos with terrified colleagues and ominous warnings. Death lived in churches. Crematoriums. Hospitals. Not the cafeteria, played out on the flickering projector that just months before had displayed the orientation speech. 

 April let the conversation wash over her. In her head, Jerry was laughing, watching their expressions as he switched on the disco lights for the first time. Then he was glassy eyed and cold. Then he was alive again. Scared for his life. The realisation that he knew he was going to die hit her. Christ. What had [i]that[/i] been like? 

 She chewed on her bottom lip. It was dry, scabbed over from repeating that same habit far too many times. It was useless to try and resolve the three images she had of Jerry, at least whilst all three were so horrifically fresh. Instead, she got to her feet, walked over to where Jerry’s laptop was plugged into the projector. Closed the lid.

 She turned to the others, specifically to Reno, consternation in her eyes, [color=a187be]“I was in the lab,”[/color] she said, irritation dripping of her words because it was easier than the terror that wanted to be there instead,[color=a187be]“I had some sequences I forgot to start, and I couldn’t sleep. So no.”[/color] her eyes hardened, it was an expression she was far more used to wearing when facing down aging academics who didn’t even know what eDNA [i]was[/i] never mind why it was so important to her work, [color=a187be]“I didn’t kill Jerry. In fact, I find your eagerness to place the blame elsewhere quite telling.”[/color] And that was mean. She had to stick to her guns though. After all, no one else was going to stick to them for her. 

[color=a187be]“The important thing though,”[/color] she moved away from Jerry’s laptop. Just touching it had felt wrong, she didn’t want to be near it anymore. She stopped when she reached the other end of the table where they’d all sat,  rested a hand on her hip, trying to make herself bigger than she knew she was, [color=a187be]“Is finding Dr. Van der Meer.”[/color] It felt wrong not using the woman’s full title, so she made sure she always did, [color=a187be]“she can tell us who it is for sure, without our having to play at detective.”[/color]
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