Peach dialed 911. The circuits were overloaded, and the call failed. Half the city was declaring an emergency. Even if she got through, the police weren’t coming. Not now. Not in the storm. She was on her own, and she needed help. Don’t trust anybody. That was what Deacon had told her, but she couldn’t listen to him now.

Peach dialed the phone.

‘Annalie, it’s me,’ she said when she got voicemail. ‘Deacon’s missing. I need to see you right away. Please. Meet me at the office whenever you get this message. I’m going there now.’

37

Cab couldn’t sleep.

He lay with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He was mostly undressed, on top of the duvet and sheets. The storm howled on the other side of the wall. The placid Gulf had become a monster, lashing the coast. Dawn was two hours away, but there would be no sun and barely any light when morning came. It was a dark day. Independence Day.

Boy or girl. He found himself going back to that question over and over. He’d lost a child, and he didn’t even know if it had been a boy or a girl. Each wave of emotion that washed over him became something else as it retreated. His fury at Birch. His anger that Diane had kept the secret from him. His sympathy for her and what she’d suffered. His pain at the thought of how far she might have gone to avenge what her husband had done to her.

Cab felt responsible. He’d been the trigger. He’d set everything in motion. That one week, that one afternoon, had rippled far beyond the moment. A child had died. His child. And then others had been killed.

His fault.

He wondered how things might have been different. If Diane had carried the baby to term, would he still be in the dark? Would Birch be alive? He imagined himself seeing a ten-year-old boy – or girl – with ocean-blue eyes, taller than he or she had any right to be. Would the thought have flitted across his mind? Would there have been some kind of kinship, some connection, between the two of them?

Not that he would ever know. All he could do was speculate.

He had never thought about wanting children. He’d grown up as Tarla’s only child, so he never spent time around babies. He’d never known his father, so he didn’t know what that relationship could be like. In the early days with Vivian Frost in Barcelona, he had fantasized about a life with her, and maybe in the back of his mind that life had included kids. Her death – her betrayal – had hollowed out his desires for a long-term relationship. He couldn’t imagine himself as a husband, let alone a father. A child never entered his consciousness.

Boy or girl.