Chapter One Kiera Potter had wanted to talk, but I had nothing to say. Well, that wasn’t entirely true – I had plenty I wanted to say to him. First, I wanted to get my thoughts straight. I needed to know each word that was going to trip off the end of my tongue; like placing one foot in front of the other. I didn’t want Potter to jump in – make his excuses – before I’d had the chance to say what I wanted to. As I stood in the vacant bedroom, peering through the dirty window and down the hill, Potter paced the wooden floorboards behind me. I glanced to my right and spied the pool of black blood my father had left behind on the floor. In the colourless morning sun, I could see the blood had dried into the shape of a butterfly. It looked like one of those pictures kids did in year-one at school, where they folded over the sheet of paper, squashing the thick globules of paint and spreading it flat to make some abstract pattern. I looked back out of the window. Murphy was making his way back up the hill. He trudged through the snow, which covered his police trousers almost to the knee. I watched silently as he came towards the cottage, and his hands looked red as if covered in blood. I looked harder and could see that