He would kill her and still believe he was a decent man. He would kill her because he believed he had a right to.

If I could go back, she thought. If I could live my life again.

But there was no going back, and in any case there were her children. My darlings, she thought. She would not unwind time and make them vanish even if she could. Or perhaps she would. She did not want to die. She loved how the light moved over the heather in the late afternoons. The sea was shockingly cold even in summer, but so refreshing it made your blood sing. There was a novel by her bed she hadn’t finished. She wanted to see Glasgow again.

She did not want to leave all of this.

John was still pointing the shotgun at her and now he had raised his voice to a shout. Katrina wasn’t sure she’d heard him shout before. She thought that perhaps, at this last moment, his courage had failed him and so now he needed to work himself up to it. She didn’t bother to listen to what he was saying. It didn’t matter now. What mattered was the glimmer of what else she thought he might do.

She would not plead for them, because she knew him too well for that. So she said, composed in the face of his yelling, “I’m bad, John. I know that. But the children aren’t. They’re your children. They take after you.”

He would not hurt the children, she thought. She was almost certain.

She said for good measure, “They look like you. Especially Tommy.” She had always known Tommy was his least loved child. “But the others too. Everybody says so.”

She hoped Malcolm and Heather would take them when it was all over. If not, there was Jill. She trusted Jill not to let them near her mother. Whatever happened, at least they’d have each other.

She looked down at Beth, at the soft wisps of hair on her head. It was golden now, but Katrina wondered if it would darken as Beth got older, if it would be unruly like Nicky’s or lie flat like Tommy’s. She thought, I would so much have liked to live.

7

Tom woke feeling shattered. He’d slept more deeply than he had in years, but it didn’t feel like there was enough sleep in the world to take the edge off this kind of exhaustion.

When he finally stumbled downstairs, he found Malcolm in the kitchen, cleaning the surfaces.

“Did you sleep O.K.?” Malcolm said.

“Yeah. But I still feel tired.” He poured cereal clumsily into a bowl, spilling some in the process.

“I’m not surprised.”