"It got worse and they did tests. A white-haired man came, they said he was a specialist but I didn't like him. Everything about him frightened me. The way he stared at me. The way he touched my face and my legs with his long, hideous fingers; and that horrid thumb with its tiny balled cross. I asked him why he was there and what he was doing but he never answered. Later they discovered I had some kind of staph infection in the bone of my right leg. They tried to treat it with antibiotics. But they didn't work. Nothing worked."

Marten walked on. The rain came down harder but he barely noticed. His entire focus was Caroline. They had met in high school and entered the same college certain they would marry and have children and be together for the rest of their lives. And then she had gone away for the summer and met a young lawyer named Mike Parsons. After that, his life and hers changed forever. But as deep as his hurt, as badly as he had been wounded, his love for her never diminished. In time he and Mike became friends, and he told Mike what Caroline and only a few others knew-who he really was and why he had been forced to leave his job as a homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and move to the north of England to live under an assumed identity as a landscape architect.

He wished now he had gone to the funeral of her husband and son as he'd wanted to. Because if he had he would have been there when she'd broken down and when Dr. Stephenson had come. But he hadn't, and that had been Caroline's doing. She had told him she was surrounded by friends and that her sister and husband were coming from their home in Hawaii, and that, considering the danger surrounding his own situation, it was better he stayed where he was. They would get together later, she'd told him. Later, when things had quieted down. She'd sounded alright then. Shaken maybe, but alright, and with the inner strength to carry on that she'd always had. And then all this had happened.