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I was shouting. Perhaps it was guilt and fear from my side too.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Dylan, but I need to do something. No, I take that back.Youneed to do something. Constance came to see you, and you’re lying in bed sulking?”

“I’m not sulking,” he said, and then he was getting up, standing there in his boxers and a T-shirt, his hair on end, phone in his hand.

“Then get upstairs and look in those boxes and find me those files.”

“It’s a lot of paperwork. Most of it is electronic. I don’t even know if I have a working printer.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out. And I have a printer next door. We just have to connect it by Wi-Fi and start printing.” Like I knew what I was talking about.

“You’ll help me?” he asked, still seemingly in shock.

“I’ll help you, but there’s only so much I can do. I don’t even have an address. I might have to ring her in the morning and ask where to send it all.”

“You honestly have Gun Larsen’s number? Just randomly like that? Even Jean doesn’t have her number. She’s like…a ghost. An untouchable legend.”

“She’s not a ghost, but she’s eccentric and stubborn and pretty much lived at that hotel I used to work at. She was a regular. We always talked. She’d ask for things to be delivered, and I would—”

“Deliver,” he finished. “I can see that. You don’t half deliver.”

“Bah.” I had to smile too.

“I’m assuming there’ll be tea involved? If we’re pulling this out of the hat right now?”

“There will be tea. If you need something stronger, I have nothing to provide.”

“You don’t drink. I remember. Tea is fine.”

“Then let’s do this.”

He was standing right in front of me with his messy hair and hollow cheeks. Me in my bathrobe and slippers.

He smiled.

I did too. Then he hugged me, and it felt so bloody good.

10. Dylan

My life was obviously some kind of farce because a few weeks ago, I’d been pacing the garden barefoot, crying my eyes out. Now I was sitting upstairs on the sofa with a box of paperwork, trying to find hard copies of my custody filings and evaluations and bloody social services reports that I’d hoped I’d never have to see again.

I’d once been frighteningly organised, and now I wasn’t, which was why Jean turned up in the early hours of themorning with too many cups of coffee and some kind of tiger mindset that scared me a little.

Well, I was the one who’d taken her on, all those years ago, exactly because of that mindset and how she would get up in the middle of the night to help me find things, rip into clients when I lost my nerve and get my working day neatly in line. Just like she was doing now at six in the morning, when my phone rang unexpectedly. Unknown number.

“I had a message from Stewart with regards to those documents,” a gravelly voice said when I tentatively picked up. I’d half expected a crank call. Some scammer questioning my recent accident of some sorts. The last thingI’d expected was…this. “I thought I’d cut to the chase. Did some poking around during the night, you know what it’s like. I sleep four hours per night, and the rest is all cigarettes and coffee. So tell me. How hard do you want me to go? Thumbscrews? Slight pressure? Or go straight for the silver stake?”

I’d come across Gun before—we’d studied at the same university—and knew she always talked in those bizarre riddles. But she’d always been pretty straightforward with me. Or so I’d thought.

“I want access to my children. In a dream world, I’d ask for full custody and the children returned to me in England, with immediate effect. But I am under no illusion that that outcome will be on the cards.”

She groaned. “You were always a doormat, Dylan. Don’t start acting like you’re still Veronica’s lapdog because that will get us nowhere. What is it that you want?”

I felt like a naughty child in her courtroom, but I got what she was saying.

“I want full custody and my children returned to me.”

“And?”