CHAPTER ONE

      SHE came to him in the garden, on a morning gray with fog.

      “The decision is yours, darling.” Tears shimmered in her eyes. “But you must make it soon.” Her voice caught. “This waiting…it’s breaking my heart…”

      Dermid ached to hold her, to comfort her, but even as he reached for her, she began to slip away.

      “Wait!” he called, panicking. “Alice, wait!”

      But she was already disappearing into the mist, the loose sleeves of her cloud-white dress billowing out behind her like angel wings floating her heavenward.

      “Alice!” he cried again and tried to follow her, but the mist snaked wet tendrils around him, binding him—

      “Dad!” A shake on his arm, a child’s low urgent voice. “Dad!”

      He groaned, and jerked from his nightmare, he came slowly, blearily…gratefully…awake.

      Jack stood by the bed, in his unironed flannel pyjamas, his brown hair tufted, his hazel eyes anxious—far too anxious, Dermid thought with a pang of guilt—for a boy who had yet to celebrate his fifth birthday.

      Leaning up on one elbow, clearing the rust of sleep from his throat, he said, “Sorry, son. Did I wake you?”

      “You were shouting really loud. Was it bad?”

      “It’s been worse.”

      “But the same old nightmare?”

      “Yup, same old one. And no, don’t ask, I’m not going to tell you what it’s about. Someday I will, when you’re old enough to handle it.” Dermid swung his long legs over the edge of the bed. “But right now—”

      “But right now it would give me nightmares, too.”

      “You got it.”

      Dermid stood, and setting a firm hand on his son’s shoulders, walked him to the window. “Now enough about nightmares. Will you just look at that morning out there?” The sun, an explosion of fire atop Vancouver Island’s snowcapped Mountain Range, promised an unusually dazzling late-May day. “It’s going to be a scorcher.”

      “Too bad we have to spend half of it on the ferry!”

      “Don’t you want to go over to the Lower Mainland to see your new cousin being christened?”

      “I’d rather stay here on the ranch and help Arthur look after the animals.”

      “I’m not much of a party man myself, son, but we have to make the effort when it comes to family occasions.”

      They weren’t really his family, only by marriage. They were Alice’s family. But he was fond of them all. Except for Lacey. Lacey left him cold…because Lacey, herself, was cold. Superficial. Useless. Oh, she was decorative, he wasn’t denying that, but useless. A pretty ornament. That was all. A bauble. She was Alice’s sister, but as unlike Alice as two women could have been.

      Alice. He’d wanted to shut himself away from the outside world after she died, but for Jack’s sake he couldn’t. And for Jack’s sake, he’d remained in close contact with his in-laws these past three years,