With the door closed and the radio on she sat down at the table and buried her head in her hands. She couldn’t say why today was feeling so much harder than any other, she only knew that right at this moment she was so pent up with frustration and guilt and anger that she wanted to scream and rant and bang her fists to her head as if to break her skull. She had brought this on her mother, almost as if she’d set fire to the place herself, and though Marcy had never uttered a single word of recrimination that was only because she hardly spoke at all.

Ignoring her phone as it rang, in spite of it being Andee, she clasped her hands to her face and sobbed. It was during episodes like this that she had no idea what to do with herself, where to turn or how to bring herself back from the brink. She was so caught up in self-loathing, and the fear that Marcus would strike again to punish her for handing over the attaché case, that she felt physically sick with it. She needed him to be named as the person behind the arson attack, to be imprisoned for it, to be publicly shamed. No punishment was too great for him; were she able she’d order a hit on him herself to make sure he never came near them again.

There were times when things got so bad that she had to drive out to the moor to find a lonely spot where she could cry and shout and beg for answers from a God who clearly wasn’t listening. Or maybe He was, for it was one terrible Monday afternoon a couple of months ago that Dan had found her in a remote layby slumped over the steering wheel of her car, so tormented by grief and fear that she didn’t even hear him come to a stop beside her. She only knew he was there when he pulled her gently from the driver’s seat into his arms and held her in a way that had, as the minutes ticked by, seemed to give her as much of his strength as she needed to get past the almost uncontrollable upsurge of despair.

Later, when he’d driven her to a pub so they could continue to talk, he’d explained that he’d called the house to update them on the insurance company’s latest payout and had found her mother worrying about where she might have gone. So he’d driven around looking for her until he’d finally spotted her car, which, given the size of Exmoor, was nothing short of a miracle—aka divine guidance.