Chapter 25
NOW
Harvey’s hand is firm on my arm as he guides me across the garden, through the side gate, into the street where his car sits waiting.
Not the police vehicle from before – this one is dark, nondescript, the kind of car you’d never notice parked outside your house.
The kind of car designed to be forgotten.
‘Get in.’
The pistol is hidden now, tucked somewhere inside his jacket, but I feel its presence. He opens the rear door and I slide in without fighting. What would be the point? The street is empty. The houses are dark. Even if I screamed, who would hear? Who would believe me over a police officer?
He closes the door and moves round to the driver’s side. The central locking clicks with a sound like bones breaking.
‘Where are we going?’
He doesn’t answer. Just starts the engine and pulls away, his movements smooth and unhurried. Like we’re going for a Sunday drive.
‘Harvey – Joseph.’ I try his first name, hoping it might reach whatever humanity I’d glimpsed earlier – or thought I’d glimpsed, before I understood that everything he’s shown me was a lie. ‘Tell me where you’re taking me.’
‘Shut up.’
The words are flat. Final. No emotion behind them at all.
I press myself into the corner of the back seat and watch East Hampton slip past the windows. The houses with their gleaming facades. The park with its perfect lawn. The whole expensive, perfect world I’d tried to make my own. It looks different at night. Smaller somehow. More fragile.
We pass the community centre where I attended that first homeowners’ association meeting. Past Richard’s house, dark and empty now while he lies in hospital with a bleed on his brain. Past the coffee shop where Emma and Natasha probably gossip about me over lattes.
None of them ever really knew me.
None of them will know I’m gone until it’s too late.
The town falls away behind us. Country lanes now, winding between hedgerows that loom dark on either side. I try to track the turns, to build a map in my head, but Harvey drives with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where he’s going. Someone who’s made this journey before.
‘You’ve been planning this for a long time,’ I say. ‘Haven’t you?’
Silence.
‘The notes. The ring. Richard.’ My voice cracks on his name. ‘Was hurting him part of the plan too? Or was that just a bonus?’
Still nothing. His eyes stay fixed on the road, his hands steady on the wheel. He might as well be deaf for all the response I’m getting.
‘What do you want from me? What could I possibly give you that’s worth all this?’
The car turns sharply, tyres crunching on gravel I can’t see. We’re off the main street now, following some unmarked track that winds through trees I don’t recognise. The headlights carve a tunnel through the darkness, illuminating nothing but more darkness ahead.
My mind races through possibilities. A remote location where no one will find my body.
Some abandoned building where he can do whatever he’s been fantasising about.
The kind of place that features in true crime documentaries, narrated in sombre tones by actors who never quite capture the real terror of being driven somewhere against your will by someone you briefly trusted.
‘I know you can hear me.’ I lean forward, trying to catch his eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘I know you want something. Otherwise you would have just killed me back at the house. You had hours while I was sleeping. You could have done anything.’
A flicker of something crosses his face. Not quite a smile, but close.
‘You want me to know something first,’ I continue, grasping at threads. ‘You want me to explain. That’s why you’re taking me somewhere. That’s why you haven’t just finished this.’
He still doesn’t speak, but his grip on the steering wheel tightens. Just a little. Just enough for me to notice. I’m getting closer to something. Some truth he’s been hoarding.
‘Tell me what this is about. Please. Whatever you think I did—’
‘I said shut up.’
The words crack through the car like a whip.
I flinch back into my seat, my teeth clicking together hard enough to hurt.
We drive in silence after that. Minutes stretching into what feels like hours, though the clock on the dashboard tells me it’s barely been forty minutes since we left East Hampton.
The roads grow rougher, less maintained.
Potholes jolt us sideways. Branches scrape against the windows like fingers trying to get in.
Then I see it.
Rising from the darkness like something from a nightmare. A shape I know intimately. The skeletal remains of walls. The blackened beams reaching towards a sky they can no longer hold. The ruin of everything I used to call home.
The burned house.
My burned house.
The car stops. Harvey kills the engine and we sit there in the sudden silence, both of us looking at the wreckage.
I can smell it even through the closed windows – that faint trace of ash and smoke that never quite fades.
That lingers in charred wood and scorched earth like a memory that refuses to die.
‘Get out,’ he says.
I don’t move. Can’t move. My body has gone stiff with fear. I haven’t been here since that night. Haven’t allowed myself to come anywhere near it. And now here I am, dragged back by a man with a gun and questions I know I can’t answer honestly.
‘Get. Out.’
The locks click open. He’s standing outside now, my door wrenched wide, his hand reaching in to grab my arm and haul me from the car. The night air hits me like cold water – sharp, clean, nothing like the smoky nightmare trapped in my memory.
‘Walk.’
He pushes me towards the ruins. Towards the enormous chain-link that surrounds the property. The blackened doorframe that used to open into a hallway where I kissed my husband goodbye each morning. Where Roxanne stood with her apologies and her questions and her terrible, patient hunger.
My legs carry me forward even as my mind screams to run.
Behind me, Harvey follows.