Chapter 7

Both women screamed and spun. Celeste's face went white — genuinely white, the blood draining visibly — and the housekeeper pressed herself against the bookcase.

Damian crossed the room and stood over Celeste and looked at her for a long moment without speaking.

When he finally opened his mouth, his voice came out quiet, which was worse than anything else.

"Tell me," he said. "Tell me exactly what you ordered done in that hospital. Every word."

Celeste denied it. She was very good at denial — wide eyes, a trembling lower lip, the particular helpless quality that had always made men around her want to step in and solve things. "Someone is lying to you. Someone is trying to come between us—"

"Were there cameras in the hospital corridor?" Damian said.

She faltered.

"Because I've just been told there were. And I've just authorized my team to pull every piece of footage from that ward from the night my son died." He tilted his head slightly. "So let's just wait a moment, shall we."

His phone rang. He answered it, listened for approximately twelve seconds, and said: "Secure both of them. I'll deal with it when I get back."

He was already moving toward the door.

"Damian—" Celeste's voice, fracturing at the edges now. "Please. Don't go. I can explain—"

"We've found a lead on Lily's location," he said, without turning around. "You'll have plenty of time to explain. I'll be back."

He went back to Beachy Head alone.

The tide had gone out. The rock shelf where he'd found the jacket lining was fully exposed, slick and pitted, and a member of his team was standing at the far end pointing down at something caught between two large boulders.

He made his way over the rock carefully, conscious of the same wind that had taken the charm the day before. He crouched.

There was a torn section of fabric — the ribbon, just the ribbon this time, the charm gone — caught in a narrow crack in the rock face. The ribbon had once been red. It was grey-brown now, bleached and fraying, but he recognized it. He had worn it around his wrist for two months once, back when he'd been in hospital and she'd insisted and he hadn't had the energy to refuse.

He remembered what she'd said when she put it on him, the day he'd been discharged. She'd been crying and pretending not to cry, her eyes very bright, her voice very steady. If you lose it, I'll stop loving you. She'd meant it as a joke. She'd meant it as a warning. He hadn't known which at the time.

He hadn't known a great deal of things at the time.

He reached for the ribbon.

A wave hit the rock shelf, much larger than it should have been for the current conditions — a rogue swell out of nowhere — and salt water crashed over the boulders and into his eyes, and when he blinked them clear the rock was bare.

The sound he made was not one he'd made before. He was not entirely aware he'd made it.

"Search the thirty-mile coastal radius," he said, when he could speak again. "Every fishing village, every boat. Every hospital admission in the last week. I want to know about every woman found washed ashore anywhere along this stretch of coastline."

His team said yes and dispersed.

He remained crouched on the rock for a long time, looking at where the ribbon had been.

The first thing she saw was a low, whitewashed ceiling.

She lay there for a while, looking at it. There was a smell of salt and engine oil and something baking. Her body hurt in a general, comprehensive way that suggested she'd been in the water.

An elderly woman appeared in the doorway. "You're awake, love. We found you on the beach three days ago." She came forward and sat down on the edge of the bed, her expression warm and worried. "Gave us a proper fright, you did."

The woman tried to take her hand, and she let her, because her body didn't seem to be responding to instructions right now anyway.

She looked at the window. A fishing village. Cornwall coast, maybe — or somewhere like it. The light had the quality of the west.

"What's your name, love?" the woman asked.

She thought about this for a longer time than the question warranted.

In her mind there was a shape like a gun barrel pointed directly at her — black, absolute, too close — and the shape produced a pain that went through her skull like something physical, and she let go of it quickly.

"I don't know," she said.

She stayed for two days in the cottage. She sat in front of the mirror in the small bathroom and looked at herself and felt a vague, sourceless grief that came in waves — not attached to anything she could name, just present, like weather. When the children from the village ran past the window, she would turn and watch them, and sometimes she would feel her eyes fill with tears, and she couldn't have said why.

On the third morning, the door opened.