‘You left her? Why?’

‘I couldn’t put her through the life,’ Dempsey replied. He was speaking to himself as much as to Grace. It felt like a long-overdue confession. ‘I couldn’t let her suffer for the things I had to do.’

‘What things? What did you have to do?’

‘The fighting. The killing. I couldn’t keep exposing her to it. Exposing her to what I was. It wasn’t fair on her.’

‘What you were? What does that mean? What the hell were you?’

‘I was a killer. An assassin.’ The Vicodin was like a truth drug. Dempsey was no longer even thinking about his answers. Just responding. ‘They called it something else. Called me a specialist operative. But that’s what we were, every one of us. I was trained by the British Army. Well trained. And once I was good enough, they sent me around the world to do their dirty work.’

‘Like Braddock and Cobb?’ Grace’s question was blunt.

‘I was a lot better than Braddock and Cobb,’ Dempsey replied, his honesty in full flow. ‘But overall, yeah. What those guys were sent to do today? That was my every day.’

Grace stepped back from her stool and away from Dempsey. As if she wanted a clearer, fuller view of the man.

‘And now you regret that life?’ she asked.

‘Every day.’ In his mind, Dempsey was back in the past. Reliving the experiences that had made him. ‘I was indoctrinated, Eden. And I didn’t even know it. They recruited me when I was a kid and they filled my head with ideas of patriotism, with bullshit concepts of black and white. Right and wrong. Of friends and of enemies. If it happened in any other situation, we’d call it brainwashing. In the army they call it education.

‘But either way, I believed them. I believed that they’d only send me to do what was right. That I was only sent when there was no other choice; when the killing was justified. I trusted my government and my superiors absolutely. And so I did whatever was asked.’

Grace nodded; she seemed to understand.

‘Then how did you even meet Maria? If that was the life you were leading?’

‘I met her in Colombia,’ Dempsey replied. ‘I was in hospital there, about nine years ago. After a mission had gone wrong. I’d had a run in with someone I knew and I ended up hurt. Maria was my doctor.’

‘She was Colombian?’

‘No. American. She was a specialist, seconded from the US embassy to help after I was brought in.’

Grace nodded again. Dempsey saw her eyes flit to his torso. Even through the fog, he was aware she was inspecting his visible scars. Each a small piece of evidence that supported his story.

‘And what happened?’

‘She changed my life.’

Dempsey noticed Grace hesitate. He supposed it didn’t look like much had changed. But she didn’t say anything.

Instead she turned her attention back to Dempsey’s wounds, smoothing the antibacterial gel across the burns.