She wakes up in a hospital room. Everything feels distant, as if she is surrounded by fog. Nicholas is sitting beside her. “What happened?”

  Nicholas looks worried. “You have to promise to stay calm, Faith.”

  “What happened?”, she repeats. “Is Kenny dead?”

  “Yes. Three shots right into his heart. He was dead at once.”

  “And Mori? How…?”

  “He took the weapon from a security guard. You cried out, the man wanted to draw his gun, but Mori took it from him and fired. You cried out, he fired.”

  She closes her eyes. “And then?”

  “He dropped the gun and left. He walked to the front desk, told them that he had shot your husband and asked them to call the police. Then he sat down in the lobby and waited for them.”

  “How terrible”, she whispers.

  “Yes. We’re waiting for the charges. Murder or manslaughter.”

  Tears are flowing from her eyes. She turns her head away but does not fight them. Nicholas is silent and waits. She asks, “When can I leave?”

  “When the doctors think you are stable. It is four o’clock in the morning. They gave you something to help calm you down. The police want to talk to you.”

  “Okay. I am so very tired. But I need to get out of here, I really do.”

  “Don’t you want to rest awhile? The reporters…”

  Faith groans. “Everything is going to drop now, isn’t it? Oh God!”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Nicholas says, “They are at it already.”

  She tries to breathe. After a few minutes she says, “Alright. It cannot be helped. I want to sleep now. And then I want to go.”

  “I’ll tell them, ma’am.”

  “Thank you so much, Nicholas.”

  This is a new kind of hell. Kenny has overthrown everything with his last performance. The press do their thing and pull out every detail they can dig up. Faith reads it all during the first few days, and then she stops and reads nothing any more. She feels incredibly bad for Mori, who is depicted as an aged jealous lover. She just hopes that nothing of this gets through to him.

  Kenny is made out to be a tragic hero in some pieces, in others he is the villain. The police have found out that he entered the US with forged papers, having used up most of his funds already. He had travelled directly to Miami and taken on a job at the hotel, as a part-time entertainer. He had done Kenny Payne impressions, apparently. He must have planned ahead at some point, working towards the showdown at the gala, counting on her wish to avoid headlines. He had wanted to make her pay. Now he himself had paid, and dearly, but so did Mori and herself.

  Of Faith the journalists are not able to get a clear picture. There is the love story with Kenny, and then there is the weird friendship with Mori that lots of people from the circus can attest to. She is a spoilt brat, a witch, an innocent lamb. She is nothing of that. The only good thing about it all is that nobody has thought of dragging Tom into it yet. She keeps her distance from him so as not to give people any ideas.

  She makes a half-hearted request to be allowed to visit Mori, which is declined. Then she sees no reason to stay and accepts Mike Carter’s offer to use his private jet to get back to Scotland.