David feared nothing and everything. The bomb he carried was a defense against being overpowered, but it was also a commitment to give his life for Emily—or Maddison—if necessary. When a man was willing to die for someone else, ready to die, he feared nothing in practice; no threat could deter him. However, he could still dread the unknown, which in this case seemed to be everything: the house, the people in it, and their purpose.

“Stay back, keep away,” he said, not sure to whom or what he was speaking. His index finger curled around the slack length of floss that served as a trigger wire.

The hallway lights stopped pulsing, and the living room lights bloomed bright once more, the furniture returning with the sudden illumination.

Somehow the dark living room had not been this room now well lit. It had been another version of this room in a distant time, though his mind could not process what his intuition told him.

From elsewhere in the house, a voice rose in song. A clear, beautiful soprano. Crystalline notes. A sorrowing Celtic ballad.

David went to the swinging door between the hall and kitchen.

“If my Irish boy is lost / He’s the only one I adore / And seven years I’ll wait for him / On the bank of the Moorlough shore.”

He pushed through the door into the kitchen.

She sat at the table, staring into her teacup as she sang.

“Farewell to Sinclair’s castle grand / Farewell to the foggy dew / Where the linen waves like bleaching silk / And the falling stream runs still.”

She appeared to be in her late forties. Under a shaggy mop of auburn hair, her face—lovely, freckled, elfin—was known to him. He had seen a photograph of her with her husband, Patrick, when he had visited Estella Rosewater in Santa Barbara. Nanette Corley. Stained-glass artist. She had died of cancer twelve years earlier.

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The melancholy song had an eerie edge that raised the hairs on the nape of David’s neck, and he stood transfixed by the sight of the woman.

Neither surprised by nor concerned about his sudden entrance, she rose from the table and took her cup to the sink and rinsed it under running water and put it aside on the drainboard.

“Near here I spent my youthful days / But alas they are all gone / For cruelty has banished me / Far from Moorlough shore.”

As though the song worked a spell of silencing, storm light flared as bright as ever at the window, but no thunder followed.

He said, “You’re Nanette Corley.”

She turned to him, her stare solemn and disapproving, her voice cool. “Nanette died of cancer. She’s rotting in a grave.”

“Then who are you?”

“Technically, I’m nobody. I won’t be born for another sixty-seven years.”

“What the hell does that mean?” David was frustrated by the endless mysteries, deceptions, and evasions.