And a son.

He limped down the hallway, his feet making hollow clops on the parquet flooring, each footfall reminding him how much he had lost. As he approached the kitchen the flickering light taunted him, showing him snatches of the horror it had bore witness to, forcing him to replay it in his mind. He saw the silver steak mallet by one of the stools, the head seamed with blood and jet-black hair. He saw Kate’s silver watch, the one he had picked out for her one Christmas in a boutique off Oxford Street, now thrown halfway across the floor, the strap damaged, the glass face a perfect red oval. And worst of all—more harrowing than even Jimmy was prepared to admit—he saw the wet ruin of his own displaced eye, the white ball almost crimped flat, the severed optic nerves splayed in the trailing gore.

Jimmy turned away, a little too quickly, and felt the emptiness in his left socket throb.

“Fuck.” He propped himself against the door and felt a wave of nausea wash over him. The empty socket was aching, as if something in there was desperately trying to atone for the lost eye, the electrical impulses still firing in his brain, straining to remember how to see. He tried to recall the sequence of events that had led to the injury, but his memory was unclear, revealing only a dizzying montage of himself and Kate swinging wildly at each other and rolling on the floor. He thought for a moment that he could remember Kate’s long, polished nails, on fingers that he had once kissed and sucked and stroked, reaching towards his eyes… But the image was fleeting and felt more like the product of something half-hidden in a nightmare, drawing him towards a false memory rather than something definitive, where, like the man in the painting, reality folded in on itself and he was lost in an endless scream.

He stepped around the mess and headed towards the back door. On the adjacent wall was a stainless steel key tidy, and he ran his hand through the suspended row of keys in search of the one that would start the Land Rover. He unhooked keys he barely recognized and threw each one of them to the floor in disgust. Even when Kate was out of her mind, she’d still had enough sense to fuck him over one last time. She had taken the key to the Land Rover and left him without the means to fight for his own son. He pictured Kate, shoving Billy into McCray’s truck, the damn thing reeking of oil and chicken shit, and felt a red-hot surge of loathing behind his left eye for the woman he used to love.

He slammed his hand into the key tidy and listened to the dull ringing of the steel. It sounded like it was marking time, delineating the horror that had passed from the retribution that was yet to come. He stood for a moment, thinking. He remembered the day they had bought the Land Rover, how hot it had been, how excited Billy was to ride up front with his dad. He remembered it being such a good day because he’d spent the first part of it fucking Maggie Ensworth on her dining room table. She had screamed so hard in his ear when she came he’d had trouble hearing for the rest of the week. Then he, Kate and Billy had collected the car; he recalled the insincerity of the salesman—Matty or Micky, a name the man had butchered to try and convey his easygoing nature that Hopewell had instantly balked at—and remembered how the man’s forced hospitality had almost driven them away. But they had bought the car and collected it on the day that Hopewell had fucked two separate women within an hour of each other: the one he had married and the one he actually liked. It had put a smile on his face that no potbellied, oily salesman was likely to wipe off, no matter how irritated Hopewell might be by the man’s name. He had signed the necessary papers, shaken the grinning idiot’s hand, and reverently accepted the keys. Two of them. One that he and Kate had agreed to always keep on the key tidy. The other one stored away in his study in a wooden box.

He tried to remain calm. Kate had been sufficiently resourceful to take the key from the tidy; but would the bitch also have had the sense to take the spare? Hopewell stumbled from the kitchen and veered into his study, reaching for the wooden box even as he pushed through the door. He opened the lid, looked down, and allowed himself a brief smile.

Kate had been meticulous in her planning, he thought; she just hadn’t been meticulous enough.

* * *

At last, Billy had fallen asleep. The steady rumble of the truck’s engine and the soft orange glow from the dashboard had first calmed then sedated him, leaving him sprawled across the backseat, his head in his mother’s lap.

For a while they had driven through the darkness in silence, no one feeling comfortable enough to speak. Kate’s breathing had been harsh and quick, her thoughts utterly disorganized, turning on the dual dilemma of her son’s safety and her husband’s pain. She listened to Billy’s shallow breath and wondered, not for the first time, what harm she had brought upon her family; what the last hour might have done to her son.

Jasper McCray turned in his seat and stared at the boy.

“Best he sleep it off,” he said.