“Ain’t no good for him to be thinking on it so soon. Too fresh.”

He looked briefly at his wife and then returned his eyes to the road. Kate sensed a stiffness in him, and she wondered how much he was already regretting taking them on.

“You should try and sleep too, Kate,” Alison McCray said, turning her face to peer between the front seats. “You’ve a lot to consider tomorrow, hon. You need to be rested.”

Kate smiled at her, but wanted to scream. She doubted she’d ever be able to rest again. She had destroyed her son’s life and permanently blinded her husband. What would Alison have her do? Just close her eyes in the back of this shitheap of a truck and measure life’s bounty in the stars? Was that the answer?

To look to the heavens and search out the answer in the unquantifiable blackness of space? The image led swiftly to a vision of Jimmy’s gaping eye socket, the memory of the darkness she had stared into almost forcing the repressed scream from her throat. There was no answer in the stars; no easy answer to this mess anywhere. She had brought upon herself a shadow that would stay with her forever. A shadow that was already beginning to shape what she would become.

She stared from the window of the truck and looked upon the shifting blur of gray shapes, flattened by the darkness into nothing more than irregular profiles, arrangements that she suspected she should already know. She closed her eyes. This was what her marriage had become, she realized: an impression of something she barely even recognized.

She listened to the rumble of the engine and glanced down at her son. She ran her hand through Billy’s hair as he slept. His head felt warm and she wondered what horrors heated his dreams. She felt sick at the thought of the lasting damage tonight’s events might have caused; the scars the boy would have to live with as the fatherless years rolled by.

“Alison,” she said, failing to understand why her own voice sounded so distant. Alison’s head appeared between the front seats again, looking concerned. “I don’t know what to…” Kate’s voice trailed off and she looked down into the dark well of the backseat.

“It’s okay, hon,” Alison said. “You don’t have to say anything. Tonight was a long time coming. How you stood it for so many years is beyond me.”

Jasper glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “You don’t got any explaining to do to us nor anyone else. And don’t go thanking us, neither. Getting you and that boy some thinking time is nothing less than the pair of you deserve.”

Kate looked at his eyes in the mirror, fierce and determined in the reflected orange glow, and smiled her gratitude. Alison placed a hand on her husband’s shoulder. It was a gesture of casual tenderness, but it made Kate feel empty, reminding her of the kind of spontaneous love she had always been denied.

“Where are we heading?” she said, keen to drag her mind into the future and further away from the past.

She thought she heard Jasper chuckle quietly to himself. “The same place everyone goes when they need to feel safe,” he said. “Church.”

* * *

Before stumbling outside towards the Land Rover, Hopewell pulled on his jacket, reached for the telephone, and dialled Maggie Ensworth’s home number. He listened to the distant ringing and felt a spark of activity in the dark space behind his left eye: Maggie asleep in bed. Her red hair tousled.