She looked at him for a moment, his eyes on hers, his big frame in the booth, acne scattered at the tops of his cheeks: there were only hints left behind now of the one-year-old she’d watched sleep in his crib, of the boy she’d found banging his fists against the dead body of his father five years later, who’d told her stories about lost wolf pups at nine. He’d always be her son, she’d always love him, but this was a man.

He deserved to hear what she carried.

‘Okay,’ she said, and pushed aside the tray with the cheque on it. ‘Okay, so fast-forward nine years and I’m now a captain, and what that means is that I get to spend most of my day behind a desk looking at stats, dealing with petty politics and breaking up arguments between grown men about which of them has the biggest dick.’ She smiled. Ethan gave her a Men, huh? look. ‘My point is, I’m not even really out there on the front lines. The cases, they’re my concern, I have ultimate responsibility for everything, but it’s not me walking the scene these days – or very rarely – it’s not me in the room with the witnesses, it’s not me having to do the hard graft in order to take it all to the DA, packaged up, and get it over the line. And yet I still feel exactly the same as the very first day I started as a detective. I can’t let it go. I’m pulling my detectives in and asking them where we’re at with cases, not because I give a single damn about how it’s going to look in a spreadsheet, but because I’ve still got this crushing sense of debt.’

‘Debt?’

Jo shrugged. ‘I used to see a shrink in the nineties, after your dad died. She kind of became this sounding board for me. She coined that phrase, and she was right. The main reason I moved to the LAPD was because of you. I needed to make sure I had enough time with you, that I got to see you growing up, that I wasn’t some spirit passing through your life. But there was another reason as well. I thought, by getting a promotion, by chaining myself to a desk, I’d be able to shake off this feeling I had.’

‘The sense of debt.’

She smiled. ‘Right.’

‘But you haven’t?’