‘He never noticed that the dates didn’t add up,’ Gabriela says, fingering the crucifix around her neck. ‘We weren’t married yet, and I was worried he, too, would pressure me to terminate the pregnancy. It seemed better to lie to my fiancé than to kill a baby.’

Out of the corner of my eye I think I see Thistle flinch. But when I look over, her sympathy-face is back.

‘Later I realised I’d made a terrible mistake,’ Gabriela continues. ‘Ken was a good man. He would have loved Hope, and me, no matter what. But after he found out, he felt betrayed. I could have prevented that.’

‘He found out?’ I ask. ‘When?’

‘In May this year,’ Gabriela says. ‘I deceived him for almost twenty years. That was what hurt him.’

‘May eighteenth?’ I ask. That was one of the dates on the wall planner.

‘I’m not sure. Why?’

‘Never mind, I’m sorry. How did he find out?’

Gabriela looks at the closed curtains. ‘Kenneth suffered from depression. He had good days and bad days, but after Hope tried to … well, he started blaming himself. Not just for leaving the gun safe open, but for her mental state. It was hereditary, he said. So eventually I told him. I wanted him to know it wasn’t his fault.’

‘How did he take it?’ Thistle asks. ‘When you told him?’

‘Better than most men would have, I think,’ Gabriela says, a bit defensively. ‘He was angry. He wanted to know what else I had kept from him. Soon he realised there was nothing, and he cooled down. He asked me if Hope knew, and I told him she did not. Eventually he said he understood the choice that I had made, and that he didn’t want to throw away our marriage because of it. But our relationship wasn’t the same. He became withdrawn.’

Perhaps he committed suicide. Stripped off his clothes and walked into the woods. Weird way to do it, but possible. If that turns out to be what happened, I’ll have a hell of a time explaining the severed hand.

Thistle’s phone is ringing.

‘Excuse me,’ she says, and walks into the kitchen.

‘How was he with Hope?’ I ask Gabriela. ‘Did they drift apart?’ Distance from family is a risk factor for suicide, and he would certainly have felt less close to his wife.

But Gabriela shakes her head. ‘The opposite. It was as if the further he drifted away from me, the closer he became to her. To him, the genes didn’t matter. She was his.’

It’s like trying to solve two or three jigsaw puzzles at the same time, the pieces all jumbled together.

‘He was a good man,’ Gabriela says again.

Thistle grabs my shoulder. ‘We gotta go. Now.’

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 34

I eat and grow, I die without air, but I am not alive. What am I?