Sarah looked up at him from Holland’s side. She didn’t seem surprised. She looked like she’d been expecting him. She was immaculately dressed in a muted, floral dress. Her hair was neat, her make-up perfect, but Knox could see how tired she was.

‘No you won’t,’ Sarah replied. Her voice was cool, measured. ‘Stay.’

‘How is he?’ Knox asked, looking at Holland. He still wasn’t used to seeing him in his hospital bed, asleep, unable to wake up. Holland was a man with a powerful presence and it didn’t seem right for him to be so reduced, tucked under sheets in a pair of flannel pyjamas instead of behind his desk in one of his dark, pinstriped suits.

‘You’d know as well as me,’ Sarah said. ‘The nurses tell me you visit James every day.’

‘It’s the least I can do.’ Knox had known Sarah for years, but he found himself falling back on the formalities people used when talking to the grieving.

‘Is it?’ Sarah asked, her voice suddenly changing from cool to cold.

‘I’ll come back later,’ Knox said, sensing the change in her tone.

‘The hell you will.’

‘I don’t want to upset you.’

‘You think you’re upsetting me? My husband lying in a coma no one can do anything about upsets me. The one person who could help him refusing to do anything bloody infuriates me.’

Sarah had been privy to most of the details of MI5’s investigation, including Knox’s lack of cooperation.

Knox knew he owed her the truth. Holland had been more than a patron and mentor to him. Though neither of them would ever say it, the older man had become a kind of father to him, a replacement for the one he’d never had the chance to know. And in many ways Sarah had been his surrogate mother, offering her own support, ear, or advice whenever needed.

Knox wanted to tell her where he’d been the night Holland had fallen into the coma. He wanted to tell her she was right to blame him, that it was his fault. He wanted to share with her the secret he and Holland had kept for fifteen years. But he couldn’t, because Holland himself had sworn him to secrecy, and because the more people who knew about it, the more people could be hurt by it.

Sarah, however, didn’t care about that. She just wanted to know what had happened to her husband.

‘Please, just tell me where you were,’ she said, her exhaustion creeping into her voice.

Knox couldn’t bring himself to betray Holland’s trust in him after so long, even to the one person closer to him than Knox was. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘After everything we’ve done for you? I’m his wife, for God’s sake.’