Charlotte shifted uneasily in her chair. Something was nagging at her.

‘Charlotte?’

‘Mmm?’

Marina was looking thoughtful. ‘. . . Do you think it was strange that she said “this last week”—?’

‘Huh?’ On the table Charlotte’s phone rang.

‘As opposed to “this past week”?’

‘Hang on—’ She answered it.

‘Charlotte, it’s me.’

‘Nathan?’ Her heart broke into a gallop. ‘Where are you?’ She closed her eyes, willing him to say he was sorry, for all of it, that he loved her and only her, that he was coming back. In the background she could hear the sound of the car engine, the radio playing quietly. But which way was he going – to or from her?

‘Something’s been bothering me since the talk with Mateo earlier. It’s made me wonder something.’

Despair washed over her. ‘. . . Wonder what?’

‘The woman that was taken hostage in the church, the night Quincy was killed.’

She closed her eyes. ‘. . . What about her?’

‘What if it was Marina?’

They flew open again. ‘What?’ She frowned, lost. ‘. . . What on earth would make you think that?’

‘Because I think she was in the church that night, not because she’d been taken hostage – but because she was getting married.’

Charlotte froze. ‘You’re saying Carlos killed his sister’s husband at their wedding?’

‘Yes. Except I don’t think it was Quincy she was marrying. He was marrying her.’

She wasn’t marrying him but he was marrying her? She squinted her eyes shut again, tired of his theories, tired of trying to keep up. ‘You’re not making sense.’ Why couldn’t he let this go now? They’d done their jobs. It was over, all of it.

‘From the very start, I’ve been working on one basic assumption – that Jack Quincy was Marina’s husband. But I overlooked one critical detail: before he signed up to serve, Jack Quincy was a Baptist minister. Quincy wasn’t the man she married. He was the one marrying them.’

Them? Charlotte shifted uneasily, she could feel something gathering . . . ‘Who . . . ?’ But even as she asked the question, the name came to her.

‘Santi Esperanza was the other man killed alongside Quincy that night. Just like he was there with Quincy the night the Mendoza men were murdered. He blamed the Mendozas for his father’s murder. He was implicated in the slaughter of Marina Mendoza’s treasured horse the night of the fiesta at La Ventilla – just over a week before she disappeared.’

We have both loved men we have tried to hate.

‘But his name. She took Quincy’s name.’

‘Yes. To protect her child. If Carlos had found out she was having Esperanza’s child, do you think he would have allowed that? He’d killed the father, do you think he would allow the son to live too—?’

Charlotte gasped as she remembered the señora’s words in her bedroom: He may not have been why I left but he was the reason I never returned.