‘Eighteen!’ Riley could almost hear Harry’s mental arithmetic. Cordelia was staring at him like he’d grown an extra head, doing maths as well.

‘You’re, what, thirty-eight?’ Harry breathed. ‘A daughter, eighteen years back. That’s med student territory. Man, you’ve kept her quiet.’

He had. Mostly because he hadn’t known she existed. Three months ago he’d received an email, sent via the Search and Rescue website.

Are you the Dr Riley Chase who knew my mother nineteen years ago?

Names. Dates. Details. A bombshell blasting into his carefully isolated existence.

And then nothing. No matter how desperately he’d tried to make contact, there’d been no word. Until tonight.

I’m arriving on Friday. Could you put me up for a few days?

But he couldn’t afford to think about Lucy now. None of them could. The chopper was centred again. He went back to studying the waves, grimly silent, and Harry and Cordelia did the same.

Despite the bombshell Riley had just dropped, every sense was tuned to the sea. Harry was a flippant, carefree bachelor. Cordelia was a sixty-year-old dog breeder with a head cold. Riley was a man who’d just been landed with a daughter. Tonight though, now, they were three sets of eyes with only one focus.

Phillippa Penelope Fotheringham…

‘Come on,’ Riley muttered into the stillness. ‘Give yourself up.’

The floodlight from their little yellow chopper, a Squirrel AS350BA-the best in the business, according to Harry-kept right on sweeping the surface of the night sea.

There was nothing but blackness. Nothing, nothing and nothing.

‘Where are you?’ Riley asked, but he was talking to himself.

Nothing.

There were lights. The mists cleared for a moment-the fog of fear and cold and fatigue-and let her see further than the next wave.

There were floodlights beaming out from the cliffs, but they were so far out of her reach they might as well be on the moon.