And yet suddenly, and from out of nowhere, he had an image of her…one so familiar, so vivid, so achingly real, it was as if a piece of the past had been implanted into his brain: She was cooking him eggs over the old stove in their ancient kitchen. Her grip on the iron pan handle was strong, her back straight, her dark hair cut short. She’d started out as the wife of a farmer and ended up as the farmer herself, her body as wiry and tough as her smile had been soft and kind.

He’d loved his mother. And although she had given him eggs every morning, he remembered that particular breakfast. It was the last she’d ever made—not just for him, but for anybody.

She’d been murdered come nightfall.

“How do you know…about her,” Jim asked with a voice that cracked.

“We have a vast knowledge of your life.” Colin cocked an eyebrow. “But that begs the question. What say you, Jim? Are you prepared to relegate everything she did and everything she was to—as you would put it so bluntly—shit?”

Jim didn’t like Colin very much.

“That’s all right,” Nigel murmured. “We don’t care for him ourselves.”

“Untrue,” Bertie piped up. “I adore Colin. He hides behind his gruffness, but he is a wonderful—”

Colin’s voice sliced through the compliment. “You are such a fairy.”

“I’m an angel, not a fairy, and so are you.” Bertie glanced over at Jim and resumed playing with Tarquin’s ear. “I know you’re going to do the right thing, because you loved your mother too much not to. Do you recall how she used to wake you up when you were small?”

Jim closed his eyes hard. “Yeah.”

His bed growing up had been a small twin in one of the farmhouse’s drafty upstairs rooms. He’d slept in his clothes most nights, either because he was too exhausted from working out in the cornfields to change or because it was too cold to lie down without multiple layers.

On school days, his mother had come in singing to him….

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…. You make me happy when skies are gray…. You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you…. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”

Except he wasn’t the one who had left her, and when she had gone away, it hadn’t been voluntarily. She had fought like a wildcat to stay with him, and he’d never forget the look in her eyes right before she’d passed. She’d stared out of her beaten face and spoken to him with her blue eyes and her bloody lips, because she’d had no more air left in her lungs to carry her voice.

I love you forever, she had mouthed. But run. Get out of the house. Run. They’re upstairs.