Chapter 1: Ethics

Ayla

By the end of the lecture, the room had acquired that stale, airless quality lecture theatres always seemed to gather when too many people had sat too long beneath artificial light. It smelled faintly of damp coats, burnt coffee and the tired plasticky heat of old seats. Around me, attention had thinned almost to nothing. A laptop snapped shut somewhere to my left. Someone behind me stifled a yawn with all the subtlety of an animal in pain. A few seats down, a boy had his phone half-hidden in his lap and was smiling at it in a way that suggested whatever was on the screen was far more nourishing than journalistic ethics could ever hope to be.

I was still listening.

Not because Dr Hargreaves made it easy. She had all the vitality of a woman reading out insurance exclusions, and there was something almost hypnotic in the flatness of her delivery, as though any idea passed through her voice emerged thinner and less alive than when it had entered. But the subject itself interested me too much to abandon entirely. Ethics always had. The fault lines between what was right and what was useful, between intrusion and truth, between harm and revelation, all of it seemed more honest to me than neat moral certainty ever did. People liked rules until something valuable appeared on the other side of breaking them. Then it became nuance. Then it became necessity. Then it became public interest.

At the front, Dr Hargreaves clicked to another slide. “While deception in journalism may in rare cases be justified, it remains ethically contentious and must only be considered where there is a clear and proportionate public interest.”

Beside me, Jenny looked as though she was about to die of boredom.

She had slumped so far into her chair she was barely occupying it legitimately, her over-sized glasses slipping down her nose, one hand hanging limp at her side in theatrical defeat. Her tightly curled black hair had long since escaped whatever practical arrangement she had bullied it into that morning, and there was something unfairly appealing in the combination of those soft dark curls, her warm light-brown skin, and the sharp little mouth now pulled into exaggerated despair. She was the sort of girl men always seemed to notice quickly, bright and warm and alive in a way that invited attention before she had even opened her mouth. She turned her head just enough to catch my eye and widened hers in silent, exaggerated misery.

I lowered my face toward my notebook to hide my smile.

Jenny had that effect on me. She made things lighter without seeming to try very hard, and there was a relief in that I never liked to examine too closely. Friendship, real friendship, had always felt to me like something both precious and slightly precarious, as though it might vanish if I moved too suddenly or leaned too hard against it. I had known people, of course. There had always been people. But being around others and not feeling alone inside it was rarer. Jenny had a way of filling the spaces around her with warmth and irreverence and movement, of making ordinary things feel less dead on arrival, and I had become quietly, almost embarrassingly grateful for that. Perhaps more than I should have been.

“At the heart of ethical journalism,” Dr Hargreaves continued, “must remain accountability, fairness, and responsibility in the gathering of information.”

Jenny leaned slightly toward me without lifting her head. “She says gathering of information like she’s foraging for roots.”

A laugh pressed warm and sudden against the back of my throat. “Behave.”

“I am behaving,” she whispered. “This is me at my most dignified.”

The final slide appeared. A soft ripple moved through the room as people sensed the end before it was officially granted. Bags were nudged upright. Pens disappeared. Somewhere nearby, a zip was pulled with indecent force. Dr Hargreaves gathered her notes and, after one last reminder to read next week’s case study on deception and public interest, released us back into the world.

The room seemed to exhale all at once.

Jenny sat upright with a groan and shoved her notebook into her bag without even glancing at what she had written. “Coffee,” she said, voice thick with dramatic suffering. “Now. Before I commit some kind of ethical violation.”

I slipped my pen into the spine of my notebook and stood. “That would at least show initiative.”

“It would show spirit,” she corrected, pushing her glasses back up properly. “Come on. Save me from academia.”

We filed out with everyone else into the corridor, where the air felt colder and somehow cleaner, though no less crowded. Voices bounced off the walls in bursts. People peeled away in groups, already talking over each other, already forgetting the lecture they had just sat through. Jenny stretched both arms above her head and made a face.

“That was fucking brutal.”

“You say that every lecture.”

“Because every lecture is fucking brutal!”

“You chose the course.”

“Yeah, because I like journalism. I like stories. I like digging where I’m not meant to dig. That doesn’t mean I enjoy being slowly anaesthetised by a woman who sounds like she was declared legally dead several years ago.”

I smiled, though quietly. “I liked the topic.”

“I know you did,” she said as we started down the stairs toward the café. “You like murky things.”

“That makes me sound sinister.”

“You are sinister,” she said. “You’re just polite enough to hide it.”

There was no point arguing with her once she had decided on a version of you she liked. She would keep it, turn it over, polish it, and hand it back like a joke you had somehow become responsible for. I did not mind, not with Jenny. I minded very little with Jenny, which was perhaps its own kind of danger.

The queue in the café was mercifully short, and while we waited Jenny shifted her weight from one foot to the other with that restless, bright impatience that seemed to hum through her even when she was standing still. Up close she always looked a little thrown together and somehow all the better for it, curls escaping, glasses slightly too big for her face, mouth quick and expressive. There was a quality to her energy that was infectious, but not always reassuring. She was not reckless, exactly. Or not only reckless. It was more that she had such a strong instinct toward the interesting thing, the hidden thing, the alive thing, that caution often failed to register until embarrassingly late in the process.

“You know what the problem with all this ethics stuff is?” she said.

I glanced at her. “Go on.”

“It’s mostly bullshit.”

“That’s a strong opinion for someone paying thousands in tuition fees.”

“It’s a realistic opinion for someone paying tuition fees to study journalism,” she said. “Everyone likes pretending they’ve got these sacred, unshakeable principles, but the second there’s a story actually worth having, suddenly everything becomes flexible. Suddenly it’s nuanced. Suddenly it’s justified.”

“That doesn’t mean the principles don’t matter.”

“No,” she admitted. “But it does mean people lie about themselves. Which is useful, if you think about it.”

I watched the queue shuffle forward a step. “You make everything sound vaguely criminal.”

“That’s because I’m interesting.”

“You’re morally compromised.”

“Same thing.”

The girl in front of us was taking an absurd amount of time deciding what milk she wanted. Jenny leaned closer, lowering her voice until it was almost lost beneath the murmur of the café.

“I’m serious, though,” she said. “If there was something genuinely huge on the table, something properly juicy, something no one else had, do you really think half these people would cling to their ethics?”

“I’d hope so.”

“You’re cute when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend people are better than they are.”

I gave her a look, though not a fierce one. “I don’t pretend that.”

“You do a little.”

“No, I just think lines exist for a reason.”

Jenny’s mouth curved. She leaned even closer, voice dropping into a wicked little whisper. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t suck a cock if it gave you a juicy story?”

I let out a startled laugh before I could stop myself and turned my face away as if that might hide it. “God, Jenny, no.”

“What?” she murmured, delighted with herself. “You know I’m right.”

“I know you shouldn’t say things like that in public.”

“Why? It’s journalism. I’m demonstrating commitment to the craft.”

“You’re impossible.”

“And yet,” she said, with enormous satisfaction, “you keep choosing my company.”

That, irritatingly, was true.

We ordered, collected our coffees, and moved back outside, where the afternoon had taken on that washed, silvery quality winter light sometimes had before rain. Students drifted through the courtyard in loose, temporary constellations, scarves trailing, cups in hand, conversations already dissolving into the next obligation. I lifted mine, moving the fall of my long dark hair back over my shoulder before I drank, the cold air catching for a second at the strands where the light brought out that strange faint silver in them. Jenny took a sip of her coffee and closed her eyes for a second.

“There,” she said. “Now I can feel my soul re-entering my body.”

“A moving recovery.”

“I’m brave,” she said. “People should talk about it.”

I smiled and blew lightly across the lid of my cup. Then, because the silence sat easily for a moment and because ordinary questions were sometimes the safest kind, I asked, “How was your break?”

Jenny brightened straight away. “Good, actually. Really good. My mum was in one of her weirdly domestic moods, so there was loads of food, loads of arguing over nothing, my aunt came round and started gossiping about everyone within a five mile radius, and my cousin got drunk and cried because her ex has a new girlfriend and apparently that’s a war crime.” She let out a laugh, then stopped so suddenly it almost felt like something had caught in her throat. “Shit, Ayla. I’m sorry.”

I snorted softly and lifted my coffee. “Yeah, because I was abandoned, you don’t get to have fun with your family.”

“Ayla.”

“What?” I said. “It’s only fair. Solemn misery for everyone. New house rule.”

Jenny’s expression tightened in that small, pained way people got when they did not know whether I was joking or using the joke as a knife. Which, to be fair, was often because I was doing both.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” I took a sip. “Go on. Was there at least a dramatic fight over the turkey?”

She looked at me for half a second longer, as though deciding whether to push. Then she shook her head. “Nope. We are changing the subject.”

“That sounded suspiciously like an order.”

“It was. I’m saving you from yourself.”

“How noble.”

“I’m basically a saint.”

I smiled despite myself, and felt, beneath the joking, that faint complicated warmth of being known just well enough for someone to step around a wound without pretending it was not there. Jenny did that sometimes. Not often. Not enough to make a show of it. Just enough to matter.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket and I felt, rather than saw, the shape of irritation that accompanied it. I did not need to check to know it was probably Vlad. Or that it would be something thoughtless and brief and somehow faintly expectant, as though access to me ought to exist in the same category as cigarettes or cash. I left the phone where it was.

Jenny noticed, because she noticed most things when she felt like it. “That him?”

“Probably.”

She made a face. “Do you ever smile when he messages?”

“Not often.”

“Strong sign.”

I gave the smallest shrug, staring out past the courtyard as if the answer might be waiting somewhere in the damp brightness of the day. Vlad would probably message later, or turn up, or vanish for two days and then act as though that were normal. He was not comfort, not really. Not safety either. But he returned, and some smaller, more damaged part of me still treated that as meaning something.

Jenny tipped her head, reading more from my silence than I wanted her to. “Still with him, then?”

“For now.”

“That sounds romantic.”

“It isn’t.”

“No,” she said, gentler now, though only slightly. “I know.”

We stood for a moment in companionable quiet. Jenny took another sip, then glanced sideways at me with a look that was too bright to be casual.

“I might be working on something.”

I turned to her. “That sounds ominous.”

“It’s exciting.”

“That’s what ominous people always say.”

She laughed softly, but the look remained, something alert and secretive beneath the humour. I had seen it before in flashes: when she was following an idea, when something had caught hold of her imagination hard enough that the usual playfulness sharpened into focus. It altered her slightly. Made her look less like a girl chatting over coffee and more like someone standing on the edge of a door only she could see.

“What kind of something?” I asked.

“The big kind.”

“That tells me absolutely nothing.”

“I know.”

“Is it for class?”

She snorted. “Fuck class.”

“Then what?”

Jenny looked out across the courtyard instead of at me, her expression unreadable for a moment behind the lenses of her glasses. When she spoke again, her voice was lighter than the look in her eyes. “Let’s just say I’ve found a thread.”

“A thread to what?”

“That,” she said, smiling into her cup, “is the interesting part.”

I waited, but she let the silence sit there between us, clearly pleased with herself. It would have irritated me if I had not known her well enough to hear the excitement underneath it. Jenny loved many things intensely and briefly, girls, guys, theories, comics, passing obsessions, places she had no business going after midnight, but stories were different. Stories she pursued with a strange kind of devotion. Not the neat, polished ones people handed you willingly. The buried ones. The ones that resisted.

“You’re being annoying on purpose,” I said.

“Obviously.”

“Tell me.”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t got enough to make it sound sane.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“You don’t need reassurance,” she said. “You need curiosity.”

She smiled at me then, and there was enough mischief in it to blur the unease I had almost felt a second before. Almost. Something in me still stayed alert. Perhaps because she looked too pleased. Perhaps because there was something taut beneath the brightness now, something that did not feel like one of her usual fascinations.

“What sort of story are we talking about?” I asked.

Jenny hesitated just long enough to make the pause deliberate. “The kind people laugh at until they can’t.”

I frowned. “That sounds even worse!”

“It sounds fun.”

“It sounds like trouble.”

She grinned. “Those are often the same thing.”

The wind moved lightly through the courtyard then, lifting the curls at her temple and carrying with it the distant smell of wet pavement and traffic. Somewhere behind us a group burst briefly into laughter. The world remained entirely ordinary. Coffee cups. Grey sky. Students crossing campus with their heads bent toward the cold. And yet I had the strangest sense, just for a moment, that something had shifted fractionally beneath the surface of the day, as if an unseen mechanism had clicked into place and nothing around me had noticed but me.

Jenny looked back at me over the rim of her cup. “I’ll tell you when I’ve got more.”

“That sounds suspiciously like you want me interested.”

“I do want you interested.”

“Why?”

Her smile softened, though only a little. “Because you’ll get it.”

There are some words that settle somewhere deeper than they ought to, not because they are extraordinary, but because they land exactly where something in you has been left exposed. You’ll get it. So simple, almost nothing, and yet I felt it all the same. The small warmth of being thought of. The quieter comfort of being included before I had even asked.

Maybe that was why I followed when she started walking again, crossing the courtyard with that easy certainty of hers, as though the day were already bending toward whatever came next. Or maybe I would have followed anyway. Maybe the truth was simpler and less flattering than that. Jenny had become one of the few people whose orbit I entered without resistance, one of the few people beside whom I did not have to perform being less lonely than I was.

I took a sip of coffee and fell into step with her.

I did not know then what she was circling, only that it had lit something in her, and that some smaller answering thing in me was already leaning toward it too. Toward the secrecy, perhaps. Toward the promise of being let in. Toward whatever strange door she had found the outline of and had not yet opened.

All I knew for certain was that the afternoon no longer felt quite as empty as it had an hour before.

And that, later, would seem like a very small thing to have trusted.