Chapter 6
NOW
The doorbell rings at half past eight, and I nearly don’t answer it.
I’ve been sitting in the dark for hours, curtains drawn, lights off, trying to make myself invisible.
After today’s disaster, I came home and haven’t moved from the couch except to use the bathroom.
My phone has buzzed twice – messages I haven’t read – and I’ve watched the daylight fade through the gaps in the curtains until the room turned grey, then black.
The doorbell rings again. Longer this time. Insistent.
I force myself up and walk to the door, checking through the peephole first. A habit I developed after the note. Richard stands on my doorstep, holding a bottle of wine and looking concerned.
I spring open the door immediately.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I heard about this morning. Thought I’d check in.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Emma texted me. She’s worried about you.’ He holds up the wine. ‘I brought liquid company. Can I come in?’
I should say no. Should tell him I’m fine, just tired, need an early night. But spending another hour alone in the dark would make something inside me crack.
‘Yes. Please.’
He follows me into the kitchen and I turn on the lights, blinking against the sudden brightness.
Richard sets the wine on the counter and finds glasses without asking, moving through my kitchen like he’s done it before.
Like he belongs here. The familiarity of it should bother me, but instead it’s comforting.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asks, pouring wine into both glasses.
‘Not really.’
‘Fair enough.’ He slides one glass towards me. ‘We can just sit then. Or I can leave, if you’d rather be alone.’
‘No. Stay. Please.’
We move to the living room and I curl into one corner of the couch while Richard takes the other end, a respectful distance between us.
The wine sits untouched on the coffee table in front of me.
I want it – want the softening it would bring, the blurring of edges – but I can’t risk saying something I shouldn’t, revealing something I can’t take back.
I just feel guilty for not telling him before he poured me a glass.
Anyway, I’ve spent enough time drunk in the months after the fire to know what happens when I let my guard down.
The way memories surface that should stay buried.
The way my tongue loosens and truth starts spilling out before I can stop it.
I told a bartender once – three glasses of wine in, crying in a bar two towns over where no one knew me – that I’d killed my husband.
Thankfully, she knew I was being metaphorical.
Dramatic. The ravings of a grieving widow who’d convinced herself she was somehow responsible for an accident that wasn’t her fault.
She’d patted my hand and poured me water and called me a taxi.
That was the last time I drank with company.
‘Emma said Caroline was asking questions,’ Richard says after a moment. ‘About your husband and what happened.’
‘She was.’
‘Caroline thinks she’s protecting the town. Making sure everyone who lives here meets her standards.’ He takes a sip of wine. ‘She does mean well, mostly. But she can be intrusive.’
‘She speaks like she has theories.’
‘About the fire?’
I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
Richard is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, it sounds gentle. ‘Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to. But I want you to know – whatever happened, whatever you’re carrying, there’s no need to carry it alone.’
The kindness of it nearly breaks me. I’ve spent months holding everything in, keeping everyone at arm’s length, convinced that letting anyone close would mean losing control. But sitting here in the half-dark with Richard, his presence solid and warm and safe, I feel something inside me loosening.
‘I can’t talk about it,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m sorry. I just… I can’t.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘But you’re being so kind, and I can’t even—’ My voice catches.
Richard moves closer, closing the distance between us. ‘Kelly. You don’t owe me anything. Not explanations, not your story, nothing. I’m here because I want to be. Because I like you. That’s all.’
I look at him then, really look at him. His brown eyes are warm in the lamplight, his expression open and honest. There’s no judgement there. No suspicion. Just concern and something else I can’t quite figure out.
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Why do you like me? You don’t know anything about me.’
‘I know enough. I know you’re kind. I know you’re trying to build a life here, even though it’s clearly hard for you.
I know you’re braver than you think you are.
’ He pauses. ‘And I know you’re running from something.
But everyone in East Hampton is running from something. That’s why we all ended up here.’
‘Even you?’
‘Especially me.’ He smiles, but there’s sadness in it.
‘I had a whole life in London before this. A wife, a career track at a big hospital, everything mapped out. Then she left, and the career didn’t seem to matter any more, and I realised I’d been performing a life instead of living one. So I came here. Started over.’
‘Does it work? Starting over?’
‘Some days. Other days I wake up and still expect things to go back to normal.’ He shrugs. ‘But it gets easier. The weight of it gets lighter. You learn to carry it differently.’
I think about Daniel. About the weight I’ve been carrying since the fire. About whether it will ever feel lighter or if this is just what life is now – this constant vigilance, this fear of being found out.
‘What if the thing you’re running from catches up?’ I ask.
‘Then you deal with it. You face it, or you run again, or you find some third option you hadn’t considered. But don’t do it alone.’
I want to believe him that there’s a version of this story where I’m not alone with my secrets, where someone knows the truth and stays anyway.
But I’ve learned not to trust wants. Wants get you in trouble.
Wants are what led me to Daniel in the first place, to that life I thought I wanted, to the choices that ended in flames and sirens.
Still, when Richard reaches out and takes my hand, I don’t pull away.
His palm is warm against mine, his fingers threading through mine with easy familiarity. We sit like that for a long time, not speaking, just breathing in sync. The wine remains untouched. The room is quiet except for the distant sound of wind against windows.
‘I keep smelling smoke,’ I say eventually. The words slip past my defences. ‘Even though there isn’t any. Even though I know it’s not real. I’ll be doing something completely normal and suddenly I can smell it, and I’m back there, and I can’t breathe.’
Richard’s hand tightens around mine. ‘That’s normal. After trauma. Your brain is trying to process what happened. Trust me, I’m a doctor.’
I smile lazily. ‘It doesn’t feel normal. It feels like I’m going insane.’
‘You’re not, I promise.’ He shifts a little, his thumb rubbing my hand.
‘I had a patient once, a firefighter who’d been in a building collapse.
Months after he recovered physically, he’d still panic at certain sounds.
The creak of metal. The groan of timber under stress.
His brain had catalogued those sounds as danger, and it took a long time to untrain that response. ’
‘Did he? Untrain it?’
‘Eventually. With time, help, and a little patience.’ Richard looks at me. ‘You need to be patient with yourself, Kelly. You’ve been through something terrible. You’re allowed to not be okay.’
‘What if I’m never okay again?’
‘Then we work with that. We find a version of okay that fits who you are now.’
The ‘we’ in that sentence does something to me. Implies a future in which he’s planning still to be around. I look down at our joined hands. His are larger than mine, solid and capable. Doctor’s hands. Hands that have held people through pain, guided them through recovery. Hands that feel safe.
‘I’m so tired,’ I whisper. ‘I’m so tired of being afraid all the time.’
‘Then stop. Just for tonight. Let yourself rest.’
He shifts on the couch again, moving back to lean against the armrest, and pulls me gently towards him.
I resist for only a second before letting myself fold into him, my head against his chest, his arm around my shoulders.
I can hear his heartbeat, steady and calm.
Can feel the rise and fall of his breathing.
This is dangerous. Letting him this close. But I’m too exhausted to maintain my walls any more, and his warmth feels like something I’ve been missing without knowing it.
‘Is this okay?’ he asks quietly.
‘Yes.’
We stay like that, my body curled against his, his hand moving slowly up and down my arm in a rhythm that’s almost hypnotic. The tension I’ve been carrying for days starts to ease. Not disappearing – it never disappears – but softening to let me breathe properly.
‘You’re safe here,’ Richard murmurs. ‘Whatever you’re afraid of, whatever’s chasing you, you’re safe right now.’
I want to tell him he’s wrong. That I’ll never be safe. That safety is an illusion I lost the night of the fire. But his certainty is seductive, and I let myself believe it, just for this moment.
I tilt my head back to look at him and find him already watching me. His expression is soft, vulnerable, mirroring how I feel. Without thinking, without planning, I reach up and touch his face. His stubble is rough under my fingertips. His skin is warm.
He doesn’t move. Just watches me, letting me lead, letting me decide.
Then I kiss him.
It’s tentative at first, testing, my lips barely brushing his.
He responds carefully, matching my hesitation, not pushing.
But then something shifts – in me, in him, in the space between us – and the kiss deepens.
His hand comes up to cup my head, fingers tangling in my hair.
My hand slides to his shoulder, gripping, pulling him closer.
The kiss is everything I didn’t know I needed.
It’s comfort and desire and distraction all tangled together.
It’s the first time in months I’ve felt something other than fear or guilt.
It’s permission to be someone other than Kelly Reynolds, Tragic Widow.
Just Kelly. Just a woman kissing a man who makes her feel safe.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard. Richard’s eyes are dark, his expression dazed.
‘Sorry,’ I say automatically.
‘Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry for that.’
He kisses me again, softer this time, and I sink into him. Into this temporary escape from everything waiting outside this room. We kiss until my lips feel bruised and my body feels warm and liquid. Until the fear recedes to background noise, and I can almost forget why I came to East Hampton.
Eventually, we settle back into our previous position, my head on his chest, his arms around me. But now there’s a new awareness between us. A shift in whatever this is becoming.
‘Stay,’ I whisper. ‘Just for a bit longer.’
‘As long as you want.’
Somehow, his heartbeat is still steady under my ear. His warmth surrounds me. And despite everything – the note, the brunch incident, Caroline’s questions, the secret I’m keeping – I feel something close to peace.
My eyes are getting heavy, the exhaustion of the past few days catching up with me all at once. I should tell Richard to go home. Should move to my own bed and maintain some semblance of boundaries.
But his arms feel safe, and just for tonight I want to pretend I deserve this comfort.
‘Thank you,’ I murmur, already half-asleep.
‘For what?’
‘For not asking. For just being here.’
‘Always.’
The word settles over me like a blanket.
Always. As if there could be an always for someone like me.
As if I haven’t already used up my chances at happiness.
But I’m too tired to argue with it. Too tired to push him away or protect him from whatever disaster I’m inevitably going to bring into his life.
So I relax and let myself drift, held safe in the arms of a man who doesn’t know what I’ve done. Who doesn’t know that the smoke I smell isn’t just phantom memories but something real I can never escape.
But just for tonight, I let myself have this. This stolen moment of peace.
This brief respite from the constant fear.
Tonight, for once, I’ll sleep.