As the nun trudged back to her room, fifty-two ears listened to her measured footfalls. When the sound of her door closing was heard, an older boy said, “And your father’s dead too. Drank himself right into the gutter. Saw him do it.”

“Mudder’s dead,” the other boy started chanting again, but in a quieter voice, for while the nun was a good woman her patience had its limits.

The little boy did not cry out this time. His body did not start shaking, as it sometimes did when they taunted him. An hour later the chanting and verbal barbs stopped. All were asleep.

All except for one.

He climbed down from his bed, dropped to the floor, and slid on his belly like he’d seen soldiers do on the black-and-white TV in the nun’s part of the building. She would let him come there sometimes, for a drink of fresh orange juice and a slice of bread slathered in rich butter and thick jelly.

He reached the bed, sat up on his haunches, coiled into a ball, and pounced.

His hands closed around the other boy’s throat. One fist connected to the far larger child’s face. Blood spurted onto the bedcovers, and he felt it splash on his arm. He smelled sweat. And fear. It would be the first of many times he would experience it in someone else.

He aimed another fist and connected with soft flesh. Then something hard struck him in his right eye. It stung, and his face immediately felt puffy. A bony knee wedged painfully into his belly, forcing the breath from him. Still, he hung on. He hit with his hands, his feet, even his head, driving it deep into the chest cavity of the boy under him. He felt his own blood rush down his face, tasted it when the wet ooze hit his lips. It was salty and thick and made him sick. Yet he didn’t let go.

“Mudder!” he heard his voice cry out. His arms and legs worked like pistons; his chest was so heavy from exertion it felt like his lungs had solidified.

“Mudder… is,” he panted.

Hands tore at him, nails like claws ripped at his back. Someone was screaming into his ear, but it was as though they were on the other side of a waterfall.

He struck, flesh, bone, cartilage. The claws ripped. The blood poured into his mouth. The taste of the ocean.

“Mudder… is… not.”

He drove a knee right into the boy’s privates, something that had been done to him here, more than once. The older boy whimpered and instantly fell limp under him.

He found the air to scream, “Mudder… is… not… dead!”

Then the claws gripped hard and he let go and like a bent, rusty nail in an old fencepost he finally came free and fell to the floor, panting, bleeding. But not crying.

He had never cried again. Not once.

SHAW SAT UP IN BED. He smelled his adult sweat, tasted it too as it trickled into his mouth. He rose, opened the window of his hotel room, and let the cool Edinburgh air sweep away the terror of a six-year-old boy.

His room at the Balmoral looked out onto Princes Street, a grand thoroughfare of shops, pubs, and restaurants. On a high hill to his right lay the imposing footprint of Edinburgh Castle that would dwarf Malahide if they’d been set side by side. The Palace of Holyroodhouse anchored the other edge of the city and was the official summer residence of the British royal family.

Must be nice, Shaw thought, to have an official residence.

“Mudder,” he said in a low voice. He hadn’t experienced the pain of that nightmare in nearly a year. He thought it was gone forever. As with many important things in his life, he’d been wrong.

He’d been thrown out of the orphanage the next day despite the old nun’s impassioned pleas to allow him to stay. The other boy, a bulky lad of twelve, had been severely injured by the young Shaw. Some had wanted to call in the police. Yet how could one hold a six-year-old criminally liable? Shaw remembered terms like malicious intent, willful assault. He hadn’t known what they meant. But he did know that he wanted to kill the other boy. Kill the other boy so he would hurt as much as Shaw did.

In the end it was determined that a child who couldn’t even pronounce the word “mother” properly because he’d never really had one could not be charged with a crime.

Sister Mary Agnes Maria, what a truly beautiful name that had been. They all called her Sister MAM, which Shaw had translated to MOM. She was as close to a mother as he would ever get in life. He’d never had another.

He hadn’t called himself A Shaw because he was a Shaw. It was because of the orphanage. Painted on the wall over the bed of the boy who slept opposite his was the letter “A.” It was not just randomly there; not the beginnings of an alphabet train. It had once been part of a word, but the “M,” “E,” and “N” had been worn away over time, and poor busy Sister Mary Agnes Maria had never had the time or apparently the paint to put the M-E-N back into AMEN.

Shaw wasn’t sorry about that. He would look at the letter and imagine the long vertical lines of the “A” softening to form the rounded face of his mother. The horizontal slash connecting the two long lines would curl into a smile on his mother’s face, because she was so happy to see him. She had come back for him. They would leave together. They would leave right now. The “A” was his friend. It held so many good possibilities. And then the sun would rise and vanquish them all. Ever since then Shaw had enjoyed the night far more than the day. He would always be a person of the night now.

The years had passed swiftly with a quick succession of orphanages, none of them with a Sister Mary Agnes Maria. Then came foster homes, and other facilities for children who, while not technically criminal, were so close to the line that no one wanted the problem. That was every day of his life until Shaw the boy became, at age eighteen, Shaw the man.

By then he could clearly say “mother” but had not a single reason to do so.

He shut the window and sat on the bed. The man on the high-speed ferry from Dublin had connected with him. They’d gone to the open boat doors at the stern. With the wind and the engines covering their conversation he’d told Shaw the first phase of what he needed to know. As he was leaving the man had stared back at Shaw, his expression clear. If you survive this, it’ll be a miracle.

On the express train from Wales to London, Shaw had stared out the window, alternately taking in the sea vistas and the views of the Cambrian Mountains, shutting out the desultory conversations from the passengers around him. There was nothing normal about his world, and he felt it nearly impossible to relate to anything outside his own sphere.

Except for Anna. She was his first and only connection to the rest of humanity.

On the overnight train to Scotland he was visited again, in his sleeper compartment, this time by a woman. She was young, but looked old. She was physically attractive but her spirit seemed to be gone. She was a vessel only. People like Frank had torn her soul right out so they could fill it up with what they wanted. In a monotone she told him the second phase of what he needed to know. Nothing was ever written down, so he memorized every detail. If he made one slip he was dead. It was that simple.

He rose, dressed, and looked once more at the book Anna had inscribed for him.

Love without trust is nothing.

She’d be asleep. He called anyway. Surprisingly, she answered on the second ring.

“I hoped it might be you,” she said, her voice wide awake. “How was the trip?”

“I read the inscription.”

She said nothing.

He swallowed hard. “I want to trust you. I do trust you. I told you what I did. Do you realize how hard that was for me?”

“Yes, but there are obviously things you can’t tell me.”

“There are,” he admitted.