When Mared got the call about Tom, she had been blissfully asleep, exhausted after two hours of anxious tossing and turning. She'd left him with that look in his eye, the one he got when he was trying to conceal the fervour that kept him awake at nights. That drive to make things right that necessitated the bottle of zopiclone tablets in his caravan big enough to put Ffion Bowen into a coma.

She knew he felt responsible for the girl's suicide attempt, though, really, he had been one of the only people with the girl's best interests at heart. Nevertheless, he would spend the evening and even into the wee hours attempting to find the person who'd killed the girl's mother as a way of making amends.

But she hadn't felt that drive to find the truth this time. She'd felt exhausted. And at the back of her mind was that little thrill of satisfaction she always got at solving a murder case. Aron's murder was solved. The perpetrator was in custody and it was time to go home. She needed to see her daughter.

The sight of Ffion, only a year older than Elin, comatose in a hospital bed had left her with a desperate need to let her own child know that she loved her, unconditionally, and that despite Mared's own early start to motherhood, she had never felt Elin in any way a burden.

So she'd left him in the station, though it pained her to do so, knowing full well he wouldn't rest until he solved the case. And she'd come home to a daughter in a surprisingly good mood, greeting her mother warmly and letting her know they'd saved some dinner for her. Tears had pricked at the corners of her eyes at this, but she held them back, knowing how much it upset her daughter to see her cry.

They'd had a lovely evening, talking and laughing for the first time in a while. Elin even deigned to speak about school and her future a bit, which was usually like getting blood from a stone. After that, Mared had gone to bed with a smile on her face. But the sight of her mobile on her night table and the amount of willpower it took to not pick it up and call him had left her unable to settle herself to sleep.

Tom blamed himself, as he did nearly every time a case went pear-shaped and someone got hurt. Adding that on to the immeasurable guilt she knew he felt for the deaths of his daughter and Gwen Thomas, for abandoning his family and the break-up of his marriage, she was worried at what he might be capable of. One man could only take so much.

But she couldn't go chasing after him anymore. He'd been right, that day in the stairwell; she spent more time at work than she did with Elin. It'd been that way for years. But she was also a single mother who had been raising her daughter on a single income for far too long to start slacking off on the job now. She worked hard for her daughter, to keep her in clothes and trainers and to save for university, as Elin was clever enough, though she'd not yet expressed interest. But Mared wanted her to have the option to go nonetheless.

Her parents had helped out, sure, after she'd finally decided that a tiny flat was no place for a child to grow up and had accepted her mother's offer to move back into the house Mared and her brother had grown up in.

But Elin was her daughter, not theirs. She'd brought her into the world as a seventeen-year-old who'd thought she had it all sussed. Oh, how wrong and young she had been. And now, at nearly thirty-four and certainly wiser than she'd been then, it was important to her to be a good provider for her daughter. Her parents wouldn't be around forever.

So she had worked hard to do that, had put her job on the line time and again for Tom Mathias. And what had it gotten her? Not very much. She wasn't sure if she could call them friends, even. He'd never opened up to her, confided in her, invited her and Siân and Lloyd out for drinks as a team, like a proper DCI would.

No, it had been straight from the station to his bloody caravan and they wouldn't see him until the next tragic case turned up. He'd be spotted jogging along the cliffs, pushing himself to the brink, punishing himself. Probably drinking himself into oblivion as well.

He hardly praised her, never thanked her. He worried her constantly with his inability to speak about the grief and guilt that plagued him and, occasionally, affected his work. Gave her a heart attack running into burning buildings, breaking down doors without backup, grabbing loaded shotguns out of people's hands. He could be a real bastard sometimes.

So why, when Bronglais General Hospital called her, explaining that her number, written on a paper in his wallet, had been the only contact information they could find, and informed her that his badly beaten, slightly singed body had been found next to his burnt-out caravan, did she collapse onto her bed, letting out a wail that somehow managed not to wake the whole house?

Because she cared for him, she realised, as she dressed in the dark alone at 3:37 AM, the other occupants of the home sleeping soundly. Maybe a little more than she cared to admit to even herself.

The ride to the hospital was not a long one, but she was so distracted and this bloody town was so dark and wet in the middle of the night, she very nearly skidded off the road in more than one location.

When she got to his room, the sight of their seemingly fearless DCI lying unconscious and vulnerable, incipient bruises forming on his swollen face, his burnt hand wrapped in gauze, IV and oxygen tubes running from his body, she felt her knees go weak. She grabbed on to the edge of the window sill to steady herself as tears fell freely down her face. This is my fault, she thought. I shouldn't have left him. This thought chorused through her head as she entered the room, sitting down next to his bed.

She watched him for a few seconds, the rise and fall of his chest, the occasional movements he made: a twitch of his hand here, a turn of his head there. "Tom?" she asked, her voice wavering in the silence of dim room. "Can you hear me?" On not receiving a response, she reached forward and slipped her hand around his wrist where the gauze ended, gripping it firmly.

She inched forward in the hard plastic chair, laying her tired head against his shoulder, his wrist still held tightly in hers. She listened to his steady breaths and felt his pulse beat strongly against her fingers, the fact that he was very much alive comforting her. "I'm so sorry, Tom," she whispered. When he did not respond, she closed her eyes and let the rhythms of the life within him lull her to sleep.

λ

Tom Mathias was swimming. But not, as it felt, through water.

He was swimming through fire.

Fire that swirled around him, burned him, suffocated him with its dry heat.

But he kept on swimming. The picture, the one of the girls together, as they should be now, not torn apart by circumstance and the frailty of the human body, swirled ahead of him in the fire-water. He swam toward it, his legs kicking furiously, his arms reaching for it, fingers brushing the edge of the paper but never quite able to grasp it.

He kicked and kicked and swam and swam but it remained just out of reach, his daughters' smiling faces mocking him as he failed, time after time, to catch the photograph. Just as he'd failed to keep his little girl safe.

And then suddenly there was a blackness in the centre of the fire. The picture erupted into flames, curling up and reducing itself to ash in seconds while he wailed in agony. No no noooo—and then the blackness engulfed him, cold and wet, and he fell onto the hard ground. He breathed in the wet, salty air, feeling the heat on his back. He turned to see his caravan aflame, burning brightly in the cool night.

He stood, slowly, watching the fire as it raged through the little camper that had been his home for more than a year. And then there was pain. His head felt like it was split in two, like his brain was screaming out, and he turned—Brian Prosser stood in front of him, holding a weapon, a club or something, he couldn't quite make it out.

Prosser had hit him, he realised. He looked up at the man, eyes wide as the weapon came down on him again. He tried to scream, tried to stop it – but then there was nothing.

Blackness again.