Heather shook her head.

“She’ll eat her young to save herself. A kit is all scent and hot blood, Heather—it doesn’t know that it’s like a beacon for hungry things. It’ll lead the predator to the mother rabbit, and she can’t have that. She’ll eat her own babies to save herself.”

The prison guard had uncrossed his arms, and was now staring at Reave with a look of open dislike.

“I— ”

“It sounds monstrous, but some things are just not born with maternal instincts. Some things are born scared, rabbits being one of them.”

“Was there a predator in your house growing up, Michael?”

He smiled then, a really genuine smile, and she found herself recoiling in confusion, because he looked vulnerable. He looked lost.

“No one cares about my story, lass. No one cares about poor kids growing up in dirty houses that are never warm, or about what they have to do to live. What they have to do to get out. Not even you, girl.”

I do care. The words were on her lips for the briefest second, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say them. Those words might be the key to getting the rest of his story, yet she found she could only think of the photos of the girls that were forever linked to his name. I do care, she thought. I care about them and my mother. I care about Sharon Barlow and Elizabeth Bunyon.

“Was Fiddler’s Mill your way out, Mr. Reave? Is that where you escaped to?”

He said nothing to that.

Not taking her eyes off him, Heather reached into her bag for the folder in there and pulled out the prints she’d had made. Each of whytewitch’s pictures and photographs had been blown up to A4 size, a little larger than the file could take, it turned out, but something about the graininess of the images made them more impressive. The first photograph she slid across the table toward him. It showed bleak fields, a cluster of tents off to the right, and Fiddler’s Mill House in the distance.

Reave looked down at the picture without moving or speaking. Heather couldn’t be sure, but she felt like he was holding something back again, as he had when he had first laid eyes on her.

“Do these bring back any memories?”

He tipped his head to one side; a noncommittal answer.

“I guess you spent your formative years there, it’s difficult to forget.” She placed the second picture on top of the first; another photograph, this one of more tents, slightly blurry people coming and going, smoke coming from several places. “I found these online, taken by a woman who calls herself whytewitch, would you believe. She was there at Fiddler’s Mill in the ’70s, too. Do you remember her at all?”

He looked away, a flexing in his jaw that told her he was not happy. Not happy. Heather thought of her mother’s body lying broken at the bottom of a cliff, of the faces of the women who came up on a Google image search under his name. With a flourish, she produced more pictures, dumping them one on top of the other. Reave looked at them impassively, as though they were a work colleague’s boring holiday snaps.