“Are you talking about Lyman Bishop? What makes you believe he would ever try to contact me?”

“Because I’m fairly certain Evelyn thought she was meeting you at our house when she was abducted. She wrote your name and an odd number on a pad at Hanover House just before she went missing. You haven’t called her, have you?”

“I haven’t. I admit I’ve considered it on occasion. I’ve wanted to meet her, get to know her—beyond what I’ve read about her and seen on TV, I mean. But I was afraid it would only drive you further from me if I tried to enlist her help.”

“What kind of help would you be hoping to get from her?” he asked, taken aback by this admission. “She can’t explain why you did what you did.”

Amarok had purposely not confronted Alistair with this before. He knew she couldn’t come up with an excuse that would satisfy him, so there was no point. But he wasn’t himself right now, was barely coping and knew things could still get a lot worse if Evelyn and his baby were dead.

“There’s no good excuse,” she said. “I admit that. I wanted out. That’s all I remember. I couldn’t take the darkness and the cold. I felt like I was going crazy. And I knew I’d never truly escape if I didn’t make a clean getaway. I didn’t want to be split between two places, especially when one of them was a small outpost in Alaska. It was selfish of me. I see that now.”

“Really.” What else could he say?

She didn’t notice the sarcasm in his tone, evidently. Just went right on talking.

“I justified it by trying to make myself believe I was doing the right thing for everyone involved, that I was being fair to Hank by taking one boy and leaving him the other.”

“What about my feelings?” Amarok asked.

“You were only two and you adored your father. I wanted to believe you’d be happy. I knew Hank would be a good father—”

“I was happy. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t need a mother!” he shouted, shocking himself as well as Phil, whose eyes widened at the outburst. Amarok never raised his voice.

Phil’s eyebrows drew together in concern. “Maybe this isn’t the best time to deal with the past,” he murmured. He sounded worried and yet hesitant to intercede, but Amarok knew he was right. He’d let his control slip. It was the stress, the anxiety, the fatigue, the swollen and painful hand. Those things were coming down on him all at once, because he’d put everything he had, his whole heart, into loving Evelyn. The thought of someone harming her was agony for him.

“I’m sorry, Benjamin,” his mother said.

He could tell she was crying and that only made him feel worse. “I can’t deal with this on top of everything else,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

He hung up before she could respond, and the phone rang almost the second he did. Thinking it might be one of the searchers or Terry Lovett’s wife, returning his call and answering his message, he picked it up right away. He preferred not to face Phil after that conversation with his mother, which revealed more than he ever had, much more than he was comfortable putting out there. “Hello?”