Yet on certain nights, when they’d made love, or lain facing each other in a moonlight-striped bed, she hadn’t been able to escape the feeling that Paul was reliving something in his mind. They’d spoken tentatively about previous relationships and Paul had always claimed, “Nothing serious, not until you.” But she’d begun to suspect that there had been something, and that it had been serious in ways she hardly wanted to imagine. How it connected to his police career, she didn’t know. She hadn’t wanted to push it, and at some point it had become too late and too difficult to ask.

They’d moved forward nonetheless, and they’d been happy, especially when Freya had come along in all her distracting, demanding glory. Paul was a besotted dad, and Steph had felt safe and blessed. She’d stopped sensing the past like a third party in their marriage. Freya had become their third party instead. Freya had become everything.

At the same time, though, a particular question had begun to plague her—and still did—whenever she saw a veil return to Paul’s eyes or noticed him twitching restlessly, unable to just sit in peace with his wife and daughter. She could never ask this question, for too many reasons. But it came at her now and again, as did the answer she thought she knew, which she was so afraid of.

The question she’d asked her father-in-law should have been easier.

“Did something specific happen?” Steph persisted. “He never talks about it. And he seems to think . . .” The words jammed in her throat. “It’s like he thinks it’s connected . . .” She gestured at the Freya timeline surrounded by Brian’s notes.

Her father-in-law stared at what he’d written as if he didn’t recognize it. He lowered his head and plaited his fingers, and if Steph hadn’t known him better, she might have thought he was praying.

She pressed her hands over his. “Please, Brian. Tell me what you know.”

His head lifted. “There’s only one thing I know for sure, Steph. Before his final assignment with the force, Paul was hardly scared of anything. He thought all things were reversible, mendable. He broke his ankle when he was young but it healed and he was straight back on the football pitch. His first girlfriend gave him the elbow when he was eighteen but he got over it and he was off to university, his next adventure. Life seemed to slide right off him. Freya’s the same, isn’t she?”

Steph’s eyes burned. She couldn’t entirely agree. Things affected Freya more deeply than people realized. She didn’t correct Brian, though: This was the most she’d ever heard him talk—about his son, about anything.