As he strode along the Thames path, propelled by that ever-increasing nervous energy, Paul felt Freya bounding beside him. Doing the sidestepping thing she would do when she was in the mood to jog-and-chat, her hands shadowboxing, eyes dancing. He’d long ago accepted that he and Freya didn’t have quite the same brand of closeness as Steph and she had. Maybe it was an entrenched mother-daughter thing, or maybe because he was naturally more reticent, but Steph tended to be the confidante, the tear-drier, and Paul had to admit he left those things to her. But he had always been the one Freya wanted to race, or shoot penalties against, or compete with on the diving board during her swimming phase when they used to call her Flipper. She’d reawakened elements of him that had been diluted since he’d left the police: competitiveness, energy, drive. He needed to revive those qualities again now, and he prayed she was using them, too, that they were fighting their way back to one another.

He saw Yvette before she saw him. She was on the bridge, staring down at the water, the wind toying with the hem of her long red coat. Her hair was shorter than it used to be, with glimmers of gray. She still emitted an aura of calm—did all psychotherapists have that? Even the stretch of river flowing beneath her gaze seemed more tranquil than the fast-flowing bend further ahead. Paul’s heartbeat settled into a less frenetic rhythm. Surely Yvette would be able to help him. And he certainly wouldn’t resist her help, the way he had when he’d first been ordered to start seeing her as part of the police’s “duty of care.”

He thought of her therapy room with the beech tree outside and the window always fractionally open. The books about PTSD that filled her shelves; her patience as Paul sat for long, silent stretches, finally beginning to cooperate near the end of each session. Nobody else knew so much about him. Not even Steph and Freya, who’d been like new limbs and a new heart after everything that had happened before.

Now he felt like one of his limbs had been hacked off as punishment for thinking he deserved to live normally again.

Yvette turned at the sound of his footsteps, and Paul realized she wasn’t as calm as she’d first appeared. Her lined, worried eyes made his heart fire up again.

“Paul,” she said. “What’s happened? DI Glover called me yesterday and asked whether I’d heard from you. He wouldn’t say why. Then I got your text. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”