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I-I didn’t give it any thought. I want to be here when she gets out so I can get some answers from the doctors about her condition and the extent of her injuries. I want to be holding her hand when she wakes up and tells me hello.”
    For a brief moment his mind wandered in another direction… What if she didn’t make it out, what if the doctors had nothing to tell him other than they’d tried their best? What if he never heard her voice again? Christ, he wasn’t ready to go down that road.
    As if sensing his fragile emotions, Brandon stood and walked over to where Tom stood propped against the wall. He patted his brother on the shoulder.
    “It’s okay, mate. We understand. It wasn’t that long ago when I was sitting at Alex’s bedside.”
    Clayton listened and nodded, as if remembering. Tom compressed his lips. No one needed to be reminded of how serious it had been. Alex was also a police officer and had spent a week in the intensive care unit after being shot in the line of duty. For a while, they’d been scared she wouldn’t make it.
    “She’s going to be okay, Tom,” Brandon murmured, his voice firm with reassurance.
    Tom blinked back tears and nodded. “Yeah, of course she is.” The stress of the last few hours was taking its toll. A burning sensation radiated below his ribs on the left side near his sternum, up through his chest and down over his shoulder. He instinctively went to rub the area hoping it would bring him some relief. His hand brushed up against the lump below his left nipple.
    He’d found it more than a year ago and had managed to ignore it for just as long. Over the months, he’d made at least two doctor’s appointments, but hadn’t managed to keep either of them. Before he knew it, the anniversary of the day he’d discovered the lump came and went and he was reminded he still hadn’t done anything about it.
    After his father’s brush with death from a ruptured brain aneurysm last Christmas, Tom had finally resolved to do something about it, but he’d gotten busy at work and there was always something going on with the kids. Time slid by. More weeks went by before he finally made another appointment.
    It was scheduled for three days away. Yet again, it looked like another appointment would be missed. Now, it seemed so less important than being by his wife’s side. They’d known each other for more than seventeen years. A lifetime. And yet, it felt like it was only yesterday…

CHAPTER THREE

    Seventeen years earlier

    It was late into the night and Tom was well into his cups. Despite being at a party, he was feeling a long way from cheerful. He’d been drinking steadily for the past few hours in an effort to obliterate his day. To call it shitty was putting it too mildly. He was twenty-two years old and a junior constable stationed in Sydney’s outer west, and even though he’d undergone rigorous training and numerous psychological tests while at the Academy, nothing had prepared him for the discovery of the bodies of the man and his three children in the garage attached to a lonely farmhouse on the edge of town.
    It was the kids who haunted him.
    Seven, three and six months old, they’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Their father lay slumped over the steering wheel of the family SUV. A bullet had ravished most of his head. What was left of his face was barely identifiable.
    To make matters worse, the late spring weather out west had been unseasonably hot and humid, reminding everyone summer wasn’t far away. The bodies of the father and his children were green and bloated and oozing putrid body fluids. The stench when Tom wrenched open the passenger door would stay with him forever. Later, the forensic pathologist who carried out the autopsies would estimate the deaths occurred up to three days earlier. It was the estranged wife of the man, the mother of the children, who’d finally alerted police.
    According to the officer who had interviewed the wife, she’d