He could barely get it out.

Cormoran expanded the image, and Ellard stopped breathing.

On the woman’s right index finger was a small heart-shaped scar — the one Sidonie had carried since a baking accident when she was nine.

“It’s her,” Ellard said, and the tears came so fast he couldn’t see.

“My daughter didn’t die six years ago.”

He would think, afterward, about how little it had taken — a tilt of the head, a scar on a finger — and how a stranger looking at that photograph would have seen nothing at all, just a thin woman in bad light picking up a grocery bag.