Chapter 8

The man who came in was tall, dark-haired, wearing a suit that was slightly wrong for a fishing village — too careful, too city. He saw her across the small room and stopped completely, and his face did something involuntary.

"Lily." His voice had dropped to a near-whisper. "Oh God. It's really you."

She stood up and stepped back. "Who are you?"

He went very still. He reached into his coat and took out a photograph, moving carefully, the way you'd move around a frightened animal. He held it out.

She took it. Two teenagers, a garden, what looked like the tail end of summer. The girl in the photograph was laughing, broad and unselfconscious, and the boy at her shoulder was looking at her rather than at the camera with an expression so obviously fond it was almost funny.

"You climbed every tree in that garden," he said. "You pulled up all the flowers in your grandfather's greenhouse once. You used to get cream buns from the café on the west side of town and eat them on the bench by the river, always double cream, and you'd—" He stopped. His voice was unsteady. "You got your toe caught in a rock pool once. A crab got it. You cried for an hour and made me carry you all the way home."

She was listening very carefully. None of it connected to a specific memory. But something about his voice made a part of her go quiet.

"What are we to each other?" she said.

He hesitated.

"Are we married?"

A longer hesitation. She watched his face. He was deciding something — she could see it happening.

"Yes," he said, finally. His voice was very controlled. "We are. I'm the one who lost you, and I'm so sorry." He held out his hand. "Will you come home?"

She looked at him. At the photograph. At the empty space in her head where her life should have been.

"All right," she said.

"There's nothing," Damian said. "Three weeks. Three weeks and there's nothing."

He stood at the centre of the command room he'd set up in a hotel near the coast and looked at the map on the wall — the coastline, the search radius, the dozens of marked locations where divers had gone down — and felt the fury rising because it was the only alternative to something he didn't know how to survive.

"Get me every coastal constabulary report. Every hospital admission in a fifty-mile radius. Every unexplained—"

His operations manager appeared in the doorway. "Sir." He was holding a document in both hands, and his face had a quality that stopped Damian mid-sentence. "The police have contacted us. They've found a body."

The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with volume.

"The water—" The manager's voice was very careful. "There's significant decomposition. DNA testing has been completed."

Damian's hands had gone still. He was aware of them in a detached way — the steadiness of them, which did not reflect anything going on inside him.

"Give it to me."

The manager crossed the room and held out the report. Damian took it. He could not, for a moment, make himself open it. The document bag was sealed with a white clip. He undid the clip. The papers inside were single-spaced, official, very simple.

He found the line he was looking for.

DNA comparison confirms a match with the reference sample provided: the deceased is identified as Lily Ashford Blackwood.

He did not remember falling. He became aware, some time later, that he was on the floor, and that there was blood on his shirt from somewhere, and that his operations manager was talking to someone on the phone in a very controlled, quiet voice.

He lay there and stared at the ceiling and understood, with absolute and final clarity, what he had done.

He had married her for the wrong reasons. He had dismissed her grief. He had let Celeste use their son as an instrument and told himself it was complicated. He had sent her to that clinic and told himself she needed it. He had pointed a gun at her on a cliff and pulled the trigger.

He had been in love with her — properly, completely, in the way he had never let himself be with anyone — for at least a year, and he had not allowed himself to know it until the moment she was gone.

Lily, he thought. Just that. Just her name.

He was back on his feet ten minutes later. Celeste's room was down the corridor. He kicked the door open.

She looked at him from the bed, and whatever she saw in his face stripped away her composure entirely.

"Damian, I can explain—"

He crossed the room and set a stack of documents on the bed in front of her. "Can you explain the bone marrow compatibility reports? The ones your medical contact falsified to make our son appear to be a match?"

She stared at them.