“Then get that burden off your chest and load it on me. Whatever it is—please just tell me.”

He watched Rachel take the deepest of breaths.

And then listened as she told him.

Rachel had been reeling for the entire flight across the Atlantic.

She was still trying to come to grips with the phone call she’d had with her parents the night before.

Cancer.

The six-letter word worse than any expletive known to man.

Her mother had always been the picture of health, so the thought of her incurring that dreaded disease was unthinkable to Rachel. And made it so much worse when she was informed that it was a particularly aggressive form of lung cancer.

Rachel had insisted on coming straight home from New York and naturally her mother had tried to talk her out of it. “It’s not necessary for you turn your life upside down, darling. You have work to do and you’ll come over for the holidays in a few weeks.”

Rachel reminded her mother that she was a freelance journalist, emphasis on the word free, and there was no place that she would rather be right now. Especially with her father having run up to Scotland on a case he could have let Sergeant Hawley handle, but her mother had refused to allow any upheaval in their lives.

“I will certainly still be alive and kicking when you get back on the weekend,” her mother had told her father while they were all on the phone.

After thirty years of marriage, Grant knew better than to start an argument he could never win. It also helped that Rachel said she would be there by the time he’d returned from Glasgow. She had caught the first flight out of JFK the next morning and landed shortly after dusk.

The moment she arrived at the Maida Vale house, Rachel knew something was distinctly wrong.

The front door was unlatched. If there was one rule her father insisted upon, having seen more atrocities than he cared to recall over the years due to people’s carelessness, it was that both doors of the house, front and back, were to remain locked at all times.

The next thing she noticed was the living room in total disarray—a small end table by the couch was leaning awkwardly against the sofa, and there were shards of broken glass on the fireplace hearth. Rachel soon found the culprit—the remnants of a shattered unicorn (she had made it in fifth form) tossed in a nearby small trash bin.

“Mom?” she called out. There was no answer.

Then she heard raking sobs coming from further down the hall.