Summary
THE CONFESSION...
Callum watches Kamal Hadley announce that his daughter has been found but is unconscious. Callum convinces Jude and Morgan that Andrew Dorn is working with the Crosses, and the three agree to split up for a while, then take down Dorn. Jude reveals to Callum what Meggie told him years ago in the hospital: their great-grandfather was a Cross, so joining the L.M. would be fighting his own kind.
At the Hadley house, Sephy avoids talking to anyone about her kidnapping. Minerva catches her vomiting multiple times, and after Minerva mentions it, Sephy takes a pregnancy test. It’s positive. As the pregnancy becomes more and more obvious, Minerva encourages Sephy to tell their mother, promising to not share anything until Sephy does.
Callum stays in hiding for four months, convinced he’s actually gone to hell. He works in a car garage in Sturham, where he hears on the radio that Kamal Hadley’s daughter is rumoured to be pregnant. He throws the radio against the wall and leaves Sturham immediately.
Minerva tells Jasmine and Kamal that Sephy is pregnant, despite having promised not to. Sephy's parents expect her to get an abortion and tell her they’ll support her, uniting for the first time Sephy can remember. She tells them she’s going to keep the baby.
Callum uses their secret phone signal from years ago to contact Sephy. She meets him in the rose garden/greenhouse that night, where they plan to run away together. When Callum asks, Sephy explains that she cried after they had sex four months ago because she finally understood what he’d been trying to tell her for years: She is a Cross, and he is a Nought, and there’s nowhere for them to go. They promise to try anyway—but Callum is captured by the Hadley family’s security.
Sephy defends Callum to her parents, saying that he didn’t rape her, they made love. Kamal Hadley slaps her and says she’s no longer his daughter—she’s just a blanker’s slut, and she’s going to get an abortion. Sephy, left alone, breaks down in tears.
Analysis
Meggie McGregor tries a lot of things to keep her family together, and one of her last attempts was telling Jude that her grandfather was a Cross, back in the emergency room. This obviously didn’t stop Jude from joining the L.M. If anything, it made him more anti-Cross to know he is genetically part Cross but is excluded from Cross life regardless. Though Meggie tried her best, her attempts to pull her sons away from the L.M. ultimately drove them toward it. Meggie is a part of future books in the series, but Callum dies without seeing or speaking to his mother again.
Throughout the novel and this study guide, "nought" is written with a lower-case first letter, and "Cross" is capitalized. This is intentional on Blackman's part, as she explains in interviews. One notable exception is on page 411, where Nought is capitalized (as it is in this guide). Sephy explains why she cried after having sex with Callum, saying that she finally understands what Callum has been trying to tell her all of these years. She is a Cross, and he is a Nought. Blackman uses this capitalization to show a transformation in Sephy's thinking, where she truly says Nought in a way that isn't lesser-than; when she understands what Callum has been telling her, Sephy understands a new aspect of the racial inequality she's been grappling with since first noticing it through her relationship with Callum.
This positive growth comes immediately before Callum is captured and imprisoned on false rape charges. Sephy refuses even to entertain the idea that Callum raped her, and Kamal Hadley slaps her. When Sephy's father says she's no longer his daughter, we see that Sephy has lost all of her systems of support. Even though she's well-educated, dark-skinned, and independent, without her family's backing, Sephy is alone in the world. Her decision to not abort her interracial child sets her adrift in society, much like Callum was set adrift when his home and hopes were destroyed.
