Chapter 30
Annabelle
The sun is high by the time we pull up outside the cottage. A pang of nerves goes through me. Can I really do this? Can I really empty it, sell it, and move on? I have to stand on the step for a minute before I can make myself go in.
Four years I lived in this house with my grief and my journal and my medication, and now I’m standing on the threshold with three killers at my back, and I can’t remember how the lock used to feel under my hand.
“You don’t have to do this today,” Ethan says behind me.
“Yes, I do.” I push the door open. “If I don’t do it today, I’ll find a reason to never do it.”
Inside, the heat has made everything close and stale.
The post is a small drift on the mat, most of it for a woman who’s been dead four years, the rest for a woman who doesn’t live here anymore.
I step over it. The men come in behind me, and the cottage shrinks around them, the way every ordinary room does once the Deveaux brothers are in it.
“Right,” Aidan says, rubbing his hands together like we’re about to rob the place. “What’s the plan, little bell? Keep, bin, or burn?”
“Don’t say burn,” I tell him. “You’ve done enough burning this week.”
He grins, unrepentant. “Fair point.”
We start in the kitchen, because the kitchen is safe.
It’s mugs, tea towels, and a calendar still turned to the month she died.
I take that off the wall and put it in the keep box without letting myself look at it too hard.
Aidan finds the biscuit tin with the broken hinge and the three stale custard creams inside, and he eats one before I can stop him, then makes a face that has me laughing despite everything.
It doesn’t take long. There wasn’t much stuff to start with.
Callan moves through the rooms like he’s reading them, touching nothing, cataloguing everything.
He stops at the photographs on the windowsill, me as a gap-toothed kid on a beach, Mum laughing with her head thrown back, the pair of us squashed into one frame at my school leavers’ party.
He picks that one up and studies it for a long moment.
“You have her mouth,” he says.
“I know.”
“Not her eyes.”
“No. Those are my dad’s, apparently. Whoever he is.” I take the frame from him gently and wrap it in a tea towel. “She never said. I stopped asking. I don’t care.”
Ethan pulls something out of the back of his pants, and I know what it is before I see it, because the whole room seems to tilt towards it.
My journal.
“You brought it back,” I say.
“It needs to be back here for you to decide what to do with it. Every entry was you holding your own head under while you were drowning.” He crosses the room and holds it out to me. “It’s yours. It always was. You get to decide what it is now.”
I take it. Four years of small, cramped handwriting. Every suspicion, every dead end, the postman, the Tesco man, Mum’s colleagues, the white van, the butterfly on her wrist, she always hid under her watch. Four years of me trying to solve the unsolvable so I wouldn’t have to feel it.
I sit down on the edge of the sofa with the journal in my lap and the three of them around me, and I open it to the last entry. It’s barely a sentence. I don’t think I can do this anymore. Dated the day before I went to the club.
“I wrote that,” I say, “and then I went out to drink myself brave enough to stop. And instead, I met you.”
Nobody says anything. Ethan sits on one side of me; Aidan drops to the floor at my feet with his bad side angled away; and Callan stands close, his hand finding the nape of my neck, cool and certain.
“I don’t want to keep it,” I say. “But I don’t want to burn it either. It’s the only place she still exists as a problem I was trying to solve. If I get rid of it, she’s just gone.”
“Then don’t get rid of her,” Ethan says. “Get rid of the problem.” He nods at the page. “You spent four years asking who killed her. You have your answer. He’s ash now. The asking is finished. That’s what you put down. Not her.”
I look at the butterfly I drew in the margin a hundred times, badly, trying to remember the exact shape of the one on her wrist.
“There’s a drawer,” I say slowly, getting up and going upstairs. They follow, I keep talking, “Under the bed. Her things. The real things, not the kitchen stuff.”
I reach the bedroom and inhale deeply, moving to the bed to pull out the drawer.
Inside is the small, private museum of her.
A pressed flower gone brown. A cinema ticket.
A hospital bracelet from the day I was born, my weight written on it in biro.
And a thin gold watch with a cracked face, the one she wore every single day to cover six millimetres of ink she got at sixteen on a fake ID and never once explained.
I lift the watch out and turn it over. The strap still holds the shape of her wrist.
“I want this,” I whisper. “And the bracelet, the photos. I want to put the journal in a box, with her, and close it, and not open it again.”
“Then that’s what we do,” Ethan says, as Callan produces a box.
I lay the journal inside and then pull everything else out until it’s full.
I close the lid. It isn’t dramatic. There’s no swell of music, no clean white moment where the grief lifts off me and floats away.
It’s just a soft cardboard box on my bed and my hands pressing the flaps shut, with the four of us breathing in a stale room in the heat.
But something settles. Low and quiet, like silt settling in a glass of water.
After that, we fall into a rhythm of getting rid of junk, packing up all of my things, and the guys asking what I’m keeping of my mother’s things.
Aidan moves around the house with a black bag. He works with brutal efficiency, making the process faster.
“You’re doing well, Tinks,” Ethan murmurs as I pick up a stack of books and throw them into a box for the charity shop.
“It’s just stuff,” I mutter.
Callan picks up a small jewellery box from the bedside table. He opens it and shows me a pair of pearl earrings. “These?”
“Keep.”
He places them in the box with the journal.
We finish the bedroom in an hour. The room looks hollow.
The echoes of my life here feel thin. I walk through the hallway, checking the empty spaces where my mother used to be.
We move through the entire small cottage, mechanical and determined to get this done in one day.
The living room is the worst. The living room is the space where I spent a thousand nights wishing for a different ending.
I look at the armchair by the window. The velvet is worn thin in the spot where she sat to read the morning paper.
Aidan doesn’t ask. He simply grabs the heavy lamp from the side table and places it in a box.
Ethan stands behind me, his presence a solid pressure that keeps me from drifting into the floorboards.
He places his hand on the small of my back, a steady anchor.
I don’t look back at the empty space where the lamp used to be.
It’s a void now, a hollow patch in a life I’m leaving behind.
“That’s the lot,” Aidan says, dropping a heavy box by the front door. He looks at me, his face smudged with dust but his eyes bright.
“I want to get out of here,” I mutter, though the thought of the cottage going up in flames is tempting.
Callan comes out of the kitchen with the final bag of rubbish. He stands near the door, his posture rigid. He doesn’t like the cramped hallways or the stagnant air. He wants me back at the penthouse where he can keep his focus on the entrance.
I take one last look around. The walls are bare. The ghosts aren’t in the bricks or the carpet anymore; they’re in the box.
“I’m ready,” I say.
Ethan turns me around. He cups my face, his thumbs brushing over my cheekbones. “You’re sure?”
I nod slowly.
“The van is booked for two days’ time. If you need to come back, it has to be before then.”
“I know. I won’t. Take me home.”
He nods, and we walk out. I don’t look back when I lock the door. The keys are a heavy weight in my hand until I hand them over.
“Take them,” I say. “I don’t want them.”
He pockets them and leads me to the car. I’m not the woman who lived here. I’m something else now. Something they made.
Ethan takes the box with my mother’s things from me. It has to come with me today. Aidan takes my hand. Callan walks behind me, between me and the house.
I don’t look back at the cottage.
I’ve got somewhere better to be now.