“Daddy can look after himself. Okay?”

The boy looked at his mother’s face, a drizzle of hair falling over her right eye, and nodded.

“Will I need a suitcase?”

“I’ve already packed,” his mother said quickly.

The boy allowed himself to be lifted into his mother’s arms and wrapped his hands around her neck. She smelled sweet, like peppermint, and he buried his face in her hair.

“When we walk down the stairs,” she said, “you have to be extra quiet. Think you can manage that?”

The boy nodded, sensing his mother’s discomfort. He had a dozen questions he wanted to ask, and sensed a dozen more piling up behind, but the darkness, and his mother’s suspicion of it, had left him feeling disoriented. He clung tighter to his mother’s neck, infected with the same slow-burning dread.

“One more thing,” his mother said as she carried him out of the bedroom and across the landing. “I want you to close your eyes. Real tight, like you’re wishing for something good. Okay? You have to keep them closed till we’re sitting in Jasper’s truck.”

The boy suddenly felt sick and started to whimper.

“It’s just closing your eyes,” she whispered. “Like you’re still fast asleep. You can do that, can’t you?”

“I guess so,” the boy said, and shut his eyes as tightly as he could.

He felt his mother slowly descend the stairs. There were thirteen of them; he knew that, because he counted them, up and down, to make sure the house always stayed the same height. He counted them in his head, listening to his mother’s breathing. Wondering if Daddy was asleep.

His mother reached the bottom of the stairs and walked unsteadily towards the front door.

“Keep those eyes closed, sweetie.”

He heard his mother open the front door and felt a cold draft of air muscle its way through the house. He opened his eyes. He saw the parquet floor of the hall leading to the kitchen. A light was on; it flickered as though the bulb had been dislodged. Daddy was lying on the floor with his head hanging over the threshold. The kitchen tiles and the door and Daddy’s face were red. There was a hole where his left eye used to be.

When the boy screamed, he realized that his mother was already out the door, running down the short path towards the road. He heard the rattle of Jasper’s truck and was distantly aware that his mother was shoehorning him into the narrow backseat. Jasper was urging her to get the damn kid buckled up.

He looked back at the house and stared down the hall, still screaming his lungs raw.

He was the only one who saw his father open his good eye and clumsily stagger to his feet.

* * *

Jimmy Hopewell’s left eye was burning. He reached a hand towards the socket and his fingers came away wet. Where his eye should have been there was only white-hot pain and an emptiness so deep it made him feel ill. He tried to remember what had happened, why he was lying in the muck of his own congealing blood, but the memory, like his sight, was unclear. He remembered the argument with Kate, the dark swirl of rage that had billowed out of him, the flash of his clenched fists, but what she had done to him after that, what she had done to his eye, for Christ’s sake, he was unable, or unwilling, to recall.

Another surge of nausea overcame him and he gratefully reached for the darkness, passing out moments before the pain became too much. When he regained consciousness, his world made even less sense than it had before. He could hear Billy screaming somewhere in the distance, and he felt a great swell of shame and anger at the thought of his son seeing him bleeding out on the floor like a slaughtered pig. The boy was screaming so hard it was difficult for Hopewell to focus. He tried to move his left arm, but it was numb from the shoulder down to the wrist and he could feel only the spidery advance of his fingers as they stirred in the oil of his own blood.

The boy was still screaming, and to Hopewell it sounded a little like his own voice raging against the pain in his head.