I really thought she was dead at first; that I’d just witnessed her final breath. With its pools of deep shadow and ridges of parchment-yellow bone, her head seemed even more skull-like than it had in that first, nightmarish flash. Her hair was so thin she was almost bald; her skin fell away from her teeth in such a way that she seemed lipless; her eyebrows and eyelashes had dwindled to nothing. It was as if someone had taken an eraser to the face I’d seen in August and tried to rub it out.

Diana’s hands were clumped on top of the coverlet like pale, dry twigs, good for nothing but kindling. Her open eyes glittered in their black sockets. She let out another long breath, and there was a jaggedness about it this time—an agitation—that made me think she was aware of my presence. Against every instinct I touched her, resting my hands stiffly on top of hers.

“It’s all right,” I whispered, without conviction. I was reluctant to look at her face—every time I did so I thought of Cory’s canvases, stretched and stapled to their plywood boards—but what else could I do? The candle’s unsteady reflection was like a raging fire inside her eyes.

I didn’t know what to say. She was too weak to address my haul of questions. She was too weak to answer anything; too weak to talk at all.

“I’ll go and get help,” I faltered. “The ambulance people will come and take you to the hospital, and everything will be all right.”

The head on the pillow moved slightly from side to side, and the mouth tried to say, “No.”

Her voice was husky and small, as if she were on the verge of tears. She moved her hand from underneath mine and touched my face, but frailty had stripped her gestures and expressions to such a bare minimum that I didn’t know what to make of it.

“My beautiful boy.”

Her voice creaked up and down a crazy arpeggio, and I couldn’t make sense of that either. I dragged my hair to the other side of my neck, so that she could see my face.

“It’s me,” I whispered. “Freya Lyell. Do you remember . . . ?”

“My beautiful boy,” she repeated, resting the tips of her nails against my face. Now I felt sure it was emotion that had roughened her voice, because there were tears sliding down her face and trailing under her jaw.

“Cory’s fine,” I soothed. It wasn’t Diana’s fault her son was a liar—or if it was, this wasn’t the time for heaping blame. I wanted to comfort her, but it was difficult to know how, when she and her unhappiness were such mysteries to me.