Sephy’s grief and suicidal despair

Sephy’s grief and suicidal despair are the aftermath of Callum’s execution, but they do not remain a private response to loss: they become entangled with guilt over whether she could have saved him, anger at her family’s treatment of their relationship, and rejection of the child she carries as a substitute for Callum. The novel places her crisis within a wider sequence of bereavement, using Lynette’s earlier letter and Ryan’s execution to show how private grief is shaped by the racial order and violence surrounding the McGregor family.

Loss, guilt, and family conflict

After Callum’s death, Sephy confronts Jude while he has the opportunity to kill her. She rejects the presence of her family, telling them that she hates them and will never forgive them for standing by while Callum died. Her anger turns inward as well: she says she is worse than the others because she could have saved Callum but could not. Rather than treating her grief as a simple expression of sorrow, the scene makes guilt central to it, although her accusation that she could have saved him does not establish that she actually could have prevented his death.

Sephy’s grief is also expressed as a request that Jude finish what he has come to do. She tells him he owes it to his brother and frames her own death as a mercy. The appeal places her despair directly against Jude’s desire for revenge: she presents herself not as someone asking him to relent, but as someone who no longer expects or wants a future. Her collapse to her knees, sobbing, gives physical form to the loss of control that her words have already disclosed.

Pregnancy and the rejected substitute

Minerva tries to interrupt Sephy’s appeal by reminding her that her child needs her and that the child is Callum’s too. Sephy resists that appeal by insisting that the child is not Callum. She connects the pregnancy to the choice she could not make: her father had made clear that an abortion could have saved Callum, but she could not go through with it. The scene reveals how she has fused her survival, the child’s existence, and Callum’s death into an unbearable counterfactual. The child is not a replacement in her understanding; instead, its continued growth makes the contrast between life and loss more painful.

When Minerva continues to urge her to think of the child, Sephy says she has thought of nothing else and that she increasingly hates what is growing inside her because it is alive while Callum is dead. Her words expose the depth of her despair, not a settled account of what she will ultimately do. Minerva’s presence supplies a counterclaim—that the child needs Sephy—but does not immediately resolve the conflict. Sephy also accuses Minerva of having hated Callum, making the sisters’ disagreement part of a wider rupture in which Sephy feels that her family failed to protect the relationship.

Earlier bereavement and the execution of Ryan

The novel has already connected grief to concealed despair through Lynette’s letter to Callum. Lynette explains that she intends to die and plans to make her death look like an accident so that she will not bring shame on her parents. She writes that she cannot bear returning to a reality in which being a nought means that nothing she does will ever be good enough. Her appeal to Callum to be strong for both of them gives the later grief within the McGregor family an earlier, intimate precedent: private anguish is linked to a society that marks nought identity as a permanent disqualification.

Ryan’s execution further places the family’s losses within public and political violence. At Hewmett Prison, the announced sentence identifies Ryan as having been convicted of seven murders and political terrorism and sentenced to hanging. Callum’s later account rejects the official description of the death as suicide and says that he and other noughts understood it differently. He recalls that his father’s death in July killed something inside him, and that thinking of it continued to hurt. These accounts do not make Ryan’s and Callum’s deaths identical, but they establish the accumulated bereavements against which Sephy’s own despair develops.

Narrative echoes and the unresolved crisis

The pattern of grief is carried through sharply different narrative moments: Lynette’s letter addresses Callum before her death, Callum later recounts his father’s death, and Sephy’s confrontation with Jude brings her grief into the present as an urgent, spoken plea. The repetition makes loss something that returns through letters, memory, and family conflict rather than an event that can be left behind. In Sephy’s scene, the cry that Callum is dead sits beside the fact of her pregnancy; life continues, but continuation offers no immediate consolation.

The narrative does not resolve Sephy’s despair in these passages. Jude has not yet acted on her request, and Minerva’s reminder about the child has not persuaded Sephy to withdraw it. Her grief is therefore presented as a crisis shaped by bereavement, perceived responsibility, and estrangement, rather than as a completed decision or a recovery. The tension between her wish to die and the life she carries remains open.