Whatever softness had been in her face in the first shock of recognition hardened, fast, into something cold and final.

“Did you drive all this way,” she said, “to see how the girl you promised to come back for turned out?

Get a good look?”

“Mabel, please—” He stepped forward, and every explanation he had rehearsed on the drive out dissolved, because there was no explanation, because he had simply left and never come back, and no arrangement of words could make that into anything other than what it was.

And then a small face appeared, low, around the edge of Mabel’s skirt — a little girl who wrapped both arms tight around her mother’s leg and looked up at the stranger with an open, unafraid curiosity.

Damian looked down at the child, and the breath went out of him.