She crossed to him, shaking with fury. “I am your mother. Everything you have, you have because of me.”

He pointed to Sawyer’s photograph. “He was my family too. And you decided he was worth less than a slab of concrete.”

Security took her badge and walked her out. Beyond the doors a wall of reporters surged forward with their microphones, and for the first time in her life, Katie Carpenter couldn’t stop the questions.

Alistair sat alone afterward, and felt no triumph. The police were moving, but no sentence could give him back the ten years he’d lost with his boy.

That afternoon he went back to the bridge. Nellie’s tent was gone.

“The ambulance took her to the county hospital,” an old man told him. “Bad pneumonia. She had a fever for days but wouldn’t go — said she had nobody left.”