All the fierce protective energy of motherhood, which had spent three weeks straining uselessly against a failing heart, had nowhere to go.

And then, into that terrible vacuum, came a threat I could actually fight.

Something was wrong.

Someone was coming for what was mine.

And the same instinct that had made me a lioness at my son’s bedside, thwarted there by a disease no ferocity could touch, found at last a target it could reach.

The suspicion I felt in that hotel room was not the opposite of my grief.