Chapter 8
NOW
Four days drag by, and I start to believe I might survive this.
It’s a tentative belief – the kind that crumbles if you examine it too closely – but it’s there.
A fragile thread of possibility that maybe, just maybe, things could be okay.
The note hasn’t been followed up. No more envelopes.
No more accusations. Just silence, which I’m choosing to interpret as retreat rather than gathering storm.
Richard comes by every evening now, sometimes with food, sometimes just himself.
We talk about nothing important – his patients (anonymised, vague), my progress unpacking (exaggerated, optimistic), the town dynamics (a mad scramble for social power between the rich and even richer).
We don’t talk about Daniel or the fire or the note I still haven’t told him about.
We exist in a bubble where I’m just a woman getting to know a kind man, and nothing more complicated than that.
Last night, he stayed until past midnight.
We sat on the couch with glasses of wine neither of us drank much of, and we talked about his ex-wife – a subject he’d been skirting around until now.
She’d left him for a colleague, he said.
Someone she’d worked with for years, someone Richard had considered a friend.
The betrayal had been doubled – professional and personal, intertwined in ways that made it impossible to separate the hurt.
‘I blamed myself for ages,’ he said, his thumb tracing absent patterns on my hand.
‘Thought if I’d been more present, more attentive, less focused on work, she wouldn’t have strayed.
But my therapist helped me see that people make their own choices.
You can’t control someone else’s decisions, only your own response to them. ’
I nodded like I understood, but inside I was thinking about control and choices and how the line between the two gets blurred when you’re desperate enough. How sometimes what looks like a decision is really just the only path left after you’ve closed all the other doors.
When he kissed me goodbye at the door – a proper kiss, not an explorative one like before – I felt something I hadn’t felt in months.
Want. Not the desperate, drowning want of someone clinging to a life raft, but actual desire.
The kind that makes your stomach flip and your thoughts drift to dangerous but exciting territories.
This morning, I wake up smiling.
It’s disorienting. I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, testing the feeling.
Happiness. Or something adjacent to it. The absence of dread, at least. The morning light filters through the curtains in soft strips, and instead of immediately cataloguing everything I’m afraid of, I think about Richard.
About the plans we made last night to go for a walk this weekend, away from East Hampton and its watching eyes.
I should feel guilty. That’s what people would expect – the rich, grieving widow moving on too quickly, dishonouring her husband’s memory by entertaining feelings for another man.
Society has rules about these things, unwritten but rigid.
A certain period of mourning is required.
Public displays of sadness. The display of loss before you’re allowed to even think about moving forward.
But I don’t feel guilty.
I feel right.
The marriage had been in trouble for so long before the fire that sometimes I wonder if it would have ended in divorce anyway, given enough time.
The tragedy of his death is real – the waste of a life, the violence of it, the horror.
But the loss of a marriage? That had happened long before the flames.
We’d been two people sharing a house, not a life.
Polite strangers who’d forgotten how to be anything else.
Who moved around each other like furniture, necessary but unremarkable.
The last time we’d really talked – not just exchanged information about bills and schedules but actually communicated – was probably six months before the fire.
We’d become experts at existing in parallel, never quite touching, never quite separating.
Just drifting further and further apart until the space between us felt insurmountable.
Richard feels different.
He feels like a beginning rather than an ending.
Like possibility instead of obligation.
I get out of bed with actual energy, shower without the usual dread of facing the day, dress in clothes that aren’t just armour against scrutiny.
Jeans that fit properly. A sweater in deep blue that Richard once said brought out my eyes.
I even put on mascara, something I haven’t bothered with since moving here.
When I spot myself in the mirror, I look almost normal.
The shadows under my eyes have faded. My cheeks have colour that isn’t just clever concealer.
I look like someone who might actually belong among the affluence of East Hampton, rather than someone hiding here.
Someone who might deserve happiness, or at least the approximation of it.
Downstairs, I make breakfast – tea and toast – and eat it in the kitchen while reading news on my phone. The domestic normalcy of it feels almost revolutionary. This is what other people do. This is what living looks like when you’re not constantly braced for disaster.
Through the window, I can see the park bathed in autumn sunshine.
The light has a stunning October peculiarity – golden and slanting, making everything look softer, kinder.
A few people are out: the usual morning joggers in their expensive athletic wear yet again, a woman walking a spaniel that bounds ahead of her with puppy enthusiasm, someone elderly moving slowly with a wheeled shopping bag.
Normal town life. Safe, boring, predictable.
I could be part of this. I could build a life here. The thought doesn’t terrify me the way it did a week ago. Instead, it feels almost possible. Almost real.
My phone buzzes with a text from Richard.
Good morning. Hope you slept well. Dinner tonight?
I respond immediately, not overthinking it, not second-guessing.
Slept great. Yes to dinner. Your place or mine?
Mine. I’ll cook. 7pm?
Perfect.
This is good. This is healing.
This is moving forward instead of staying paralysed in the past.
I spend the morning doing mundane tasks that feel monumental simply because I’m doing them without the usual undercurrent of panic.
I hang pictures in the hallway – prints I bought online that arrived yesterday, generic landscapes that make the space feel less empty.
Rolling hills. A seascape at sunset. Nothing too personal that might prompt questions, just pleasant images that say ‘normal person with normal taste lives here’.
I rearrange books on the shelves in the living room, organising them by colour rather than subject because it looks better and because I can.
Because this is my house and I’m allowed to make it feel like home.
I even venture into the garden, pulling a few weeds from the borders that the previous owners clearly tended but I’ve been neglecting.
The pool sits a few feet away, bright and taunting, watching me work.
The soil is damp from yesterday’s rain, and it comes away easily in my hands.
There’s something satisfying about it – the physical act of removal, of clearing away what doesn’t belong.
The air is crisp but not cold, carrying the scent of someone’s bonfire from a few streets away.
For once, the smell doesn’t trigger me. Doesn’t send my heart racing or my thoughts spiralling.
It’s just autumn. Just the normal smell of the season.
I register this small victory and file it away as evidence that I’m getting better.
Into the late morning, Emma waves from across the park, and I wave back without the usual spike of anxiety.
She doesn’t come over to interrogate me.
Doesn’t even cross the grass. Just waves and continues her walk with her companion – Natasha, I think, though they’re too far away to be certain.
Normal neighbourly interaction. Nothing sinister.
Nothing that requires hypervigilance or defensive preparation.
See? I tell myself. You’re integrating. You’re becoming part of this place.
The brunch incident was a blip, Caroline’s questions were just standard town nosiness, and the note was probably some bored teenager’s idea of a sick joke that they’ve already forgotten about.
Nothing to do with me specifically. Nothing that will escalate.
By lunchtime, I’m actually humming. I can’t remember the last time I hummed or felt light enough for music to bubble up naturally.
I make a sandwich with cheese and lettuce, then take it upstairs to eat while sorting through the remaining boxes in my bedroom.
There’s not much left now. A few books I haven’t found space for yet.
Some winter clothes I won’t need for a month or so.
Miscellaneous items that don’t have an obvious home – the detritus that accumulates in any move, things you pack because you might need them but probably won’t.
I’m debating whether to donate a stack of novels I know I’ll never reread when I hear it.
The mail slot.
That metallic clatter of it opening, something sliding through.
The snap of it closing again.
My body moves by itself. The sandwich drops from my hand onto the carpet. My pulse rockets from calm to panicked in a single beat. That same flood of adrenaline that’s become so familiar I almost recognise it as a friend. Almost.
It’s nothing. Just mail. Bills or flyers or something from the homeowners’ association.
But my body doesn’t believe my brain. My body knows. Has learned, through months of stress, to recognise threat before conscious thought can catch up. And it’s screaming at me now that this is wrong, this is danger. It’s everything I’ve been pretending isn’t coming for me.
I sit frozen on the bedroom floor, listening. As if I might hear something that would tell me what’s waiting downstairs. As if the silence itself might offer reassurance.
It doesn’t.
Eventually, I force myself up. Force my legs to carry me to the landing, then down the stairs, moving slowly like I’m approaching something that might detonate if I’m not gentle enough.
My hand grips the banister harder than necessary.
My breathing is shallow, controlled only through conscious effort.
The envelope lies on the doormat. White. Plain.
My name across the front in those same block capitals.
KELLY REYNOLDS
For a minute, I just stare at it from the bottom step. If I don’t pick it up, it isn’t real. If I leave it there, I can go back upstairs and continue my day. I can pretend I never heard the mail slot, never saw the envelope or felt this sick dread pooling in my stomach like oil on water.
But not knowing would be worse. I’ve learned that already. Not knowing means spending every moment imagining what it might say, what new horror might be waiting for me. Better to know. Better to face it head-on.
Except I can’t face it. I want to call Richard. Want to run to his house and let him hold me and protect me from whatever this is. Want to be the person I was an hour ago, humming in the garden, believing in fresh starts and second chances.
I bend down and pick it up.
Heavier than the first one. Something inside other than paper. The weight of it wrong in my hand – too substantial, too present. My fingers fumble with the seal, suddenly clumsy, as if my body is trying to slow down what my mind knows is inevitable.
I tear it open.
For a second, I just stare into the envelope without pulling out the contents. As if looking without touching might somehow make it less real. But I can see something dark inside. Something small that catches the light wrong.
I tip the envelope and let the object slide into my palm.
It’s blackened. Warped. The metal twisted and scarred from heat, edges rough where it melted and cooled into new shapes. But the form is unmistakable. The size and curve of it. The way it sits in my palm like it belongs there.
A ring.
My wedding ring.
The one I lost in the fire, consumed by flames or buried in ash or lost in the rubble that was cleared away when they demolished what remained of the house.
Someone had it.
Someone went into those ruins – or found it somehow, somewhere – and kept it. Held on to it. Waited.
The room tilts. I grab the doorframe to steady myself, my vision narrowing to a tunnel with that ruined ring at the centre.
The metal is still faintly stained with soot, darkened beyond cleaning.
I can barely make out the engravings inside – K & D – but I know they’re there.
Know this ring as intimately as I knew my own hand once.
My hands are shaking too hard to hold the envelope properly, but I manage to reach inside. To pull out the note I know is waiting.
Same paper. Same block capitals. Same stark, damning certainty.
But this time, the words hit differently.
This time, they’re not just accusation.
They’re verdict.
YOU SHOULD HAVE BURNED TOO