Her wingman.

The closest friend she had ever had.

The reason she had folded up her whole life and hidden it away.

And the component that had killed him, the detective said, as gently as such a thing can be said, had come from Sterling’s firm.

The same rot.

The same man.

The faulty part that had taken Gabriel from the sky eighteen months ago and the sabotage that had tried to take three hundred strangers and her sleeping son into the Atlantic were not two disasters.

They were one disease, carried by one person, surfacing twice in her life across a span of years and an ocean of distance, and she had collided with it both times, and both times it had tried to take from her the thing she loved most.