Chapter 26
NOW
The ruins look smaller than I remember.
That’s the first thought that surfaces through the terror – this absurd, mundane observation that the house I lived in for five years, the house that burned with my husband inside it, has somehow shrunk.
Memory has a way of magnifying things. Of turning ordinary rooms into vast chambers, ordinary tragedies into epic catastrophes.
But standing here now, among the charred remains of walls that used to contain my life, I’m struck by how modest it all seems when all the expensive extensions are burned away.
How all the grandeur was reduced to ashes and now all that remains is the bare bones of a structure that used to be home.
Now it’s just another ruined house.
Just another life that went wrong.
Harvey’s hand is on my shoulder, steering me through a hole in the gate.
Has he been here before, investigating the scene off duty?
The thought dies before it can fully process, and he shoves me towards what used to be the front door.
There’s no door any more, of course. Just a blackened frame, the wood warped and split by heat, the brass mail slot melted into a grotesque sculpture.
I duck under a beam that hangs at a dangerous angle and step onto ground that crunches beneath my feet.
Ash and debris and fragments of things I once owned, all compressed into a grey-black carpet that smells of death even now.
‘Keep walking.’
His voice is different here. Rougher. Like the ruins have stripped away whatever veneer he was wearing back in East Hampton. Here, in this place where everything ended, he doesn’t need to pretend any more.
I move deeper into the house. The walls are mostly gone – just skeletal frames reaching towards a sky that’s thick with clouds, no stars visible.
The moon is hidden somewhere behind them, offering only the faintest grey glow to see by.
Harvey produces a flashlight from his pocket and clicks it on, the beam sweeping across utter destruction.
There’s the living room. Or what’s left of it.
The couch where Daniel and I used to watch movies on Sunday evenings is nothing but springs and ash now, its fabric consumed entirely.
The bookshelves that lined the far wall have collapsed into a heap of charred timber and unrecognisable lumps that might once have been novels.
I remember arranging those books by colour.
Remember thinking it made the room look sophisticated.
Now it’s just debris.
The flashlight beam swings left, and suddenly I’m looking at the staircase. Half of it is still standing – blackened steps leading up to nothing, to a landing that no longer exists, to bedrooms that have collapsed into the ground floor.
‘This way.’ Harvey pushes me towards the back of the house. Towards the kitchen. Towards the place where it all ended.
My feet drag against the debris. Every step feels like walking through treacle, my body fighting against what my mind knows is coming. I hesitate to look – don’t want to stand in the exact spot where everything changed. Where I made choices I can never unmake.
But Harvey’s hand remains on my shoulder. Unrelenting.
We reach the kitchen doorway – also just a frame now, the door itself long gone – and I stop. Can’t help it. My legs simply refuse to carry me any further.
Because I’m looking at the exact spot where I stood that night. The exact spot where I watched the flames rise and spread and consume everything in their path. Where I heard Daniel’s voice calling my name through the smoke. Where I—
‘This is where it happened.’ Harvey’s flashlight beam settles on the charred floor, illuminating patterns I wish I couldn’t see. Scorch marks that radiate outward from a central point. The fire burned so hot it left its signature in the concrete beneath the tiles. ‘This is where he died.’
I don’t answer. Don’t trust my voice.
‘I’ve been here before, you know. After the investigation closed.
After everyone decided it was just a tragic accident and moved on with their lives.
’ He moves closer, his breath warm on the nape of my neck.
‘I walked through every room. Touched every surface. Tried to understand how a man could die in his own kitchen while his wife escaped without a scratch.’
The accusation hangs in the air between us. I should defend myself. Should explain that I tried, that the flames were too high, that there was nothing I could do. But the words won’t come. They’ve been trapped inside me for so long they’ve calcified into something hard.
‘Do you know what the investigation found?’ He’s circling me now, flashlight beam dancing across the ruins. ‘Cooking oil left too close to an open flame. A dishcloth that caught fire. An extinguisher that wouldn’t release from its bracket. Tragic. Accidental. No one to blame.’
The smell of smoke is stronger here, or maybe I’m just imagining it. Maybe my brain is filling in sensory details that don’t exist any more, conjuring the ghost of a fire that burned out months ago.
‘But that’s not the whole story, is it, Kelly?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘I want you to tell me the truth.’ His voice drops to something low and dangerous. ‘I want you to stand here, in the place where my brother died, and tell me the truth.’
The word hits me like a speeding train.
Brother.
I spin to face him, nearly losing my balance on the uneven ground.
The flashlight beam catches his face from below, throwing shadows that make him look monstrous.
But I’m not looking at the shadows. I’m looking at his features – really looking, for the first time – and seeing what I should have seen from the beginning.
The shape of his jaw. The set of his eyes. The way his brows draw together when he’s focused on something. Daniel’s face, aged and hardened and twisted by grief.
‘You’re…’ The word won’t form properly. ‘Daniel never mentioned…’
‘No. He wouldn’t have.’ Harvey takes a step closer. ‘I’m his half-brother – the product of our father’s affair. A dirty secret. Daniel and I hadn’t spoken in fifteen years. A brotherly falling out. The kind of thing that seems important at the time and utterly meaningless once someone’s dead.’
My mind is racing, trying to reconfigure everything I thought I knew.
Daniel had never talked about his family much.
Distanced from his parents. No siblings.
An only child who’d inherited everything and felt vaguely guilty about it.
I’d accepted that story without question, the way you accept so many things about a person you think you know.
‘What happened between you?’
‘Does it matter?’ His laugh is bitter, humourless.
‘Money. Property. The usual things that tear families apart. Our father left everything to Daniel – the golden boy, the favourite son – and I got nothing. Not even an acknowledgement in the will.’ He shakes his head slowly.
‘I was twenty-three. Angry. Proud. I told Daniel I never wanted to see him again, and I meant it. Moved away. Changed my name. Built a whole new life where I wasn’t Joseph Reynolds.
I was Joseph Harvey, police officer. Self-made.
Someone who didn’t need money or approval. ’
‘But you kept track of him.’
‘Of course I did. He was still my brother, even if we weren’t speaking. I knew when he got married. Knew when he bought this house.’ His eyes bore into mine. ‘Knew when things started going wrong.’
I want to look away but I can’t. His gaze holds me pinned like a butterfly to cork.
‘I’m a detective, Kelly. Finding information is what I do.
’ He gestures at the ruins around us. ‘And when my brother died in a house fire under suspicious circumstances, I made it my personal mission to find out what really happened. Even if the official investigation couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see the truth. ’
‘The investigation was thorough. They found nothing.’
‘The investigation was lazy.’ The words crack through the air.
‘But—’
‘They saw a grieving widow. A tragic accident. A story that made sense on paper. They didn’t dig because digging would have been uncomfortable.
Would have meant asking hard questions of a woman who’d just lost her husband.
’ He’s so close now I can see the individual lines around his eyes, the grey in his stubble.
‘But I’m not afraid of uncomfortable questions, Kelly.
I’ve been asking them for months. And everything – every single thing I’ve found – points back to you. ’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Fair?’ He laughs again, that same bitter sound. ‘My brother is dead. Burned alive while you’re out living your best life. And you want to talk about fair?’
I take a step back, my foot catching on something solid beneath the debris. A brick, maybe. Or a piece of furniture that survived the flames. The ruins are full of these remnants – fragments of the life Daniel and I built together, now just obstacles in the dark.
‘I tried to save him,’ I mumble. ‘I tried. The fire was spreading too fast. I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t—’
‘Couldn’t or wouldn’t?’
‘Couldn’t!’ I’m shouting now, my voice echoing off the broken walls. ‘You think I wanted him to die? You think I planned any of this?’
‘I think you stood and watched.’ His voice is terrifyingly calm. ‘My theory is that you had the chance to help him and you chose not to take it. I think my brother died because you decided, in that moment, that his death was more convenient than his life.’
‘No… there was someone else,’ I manage. ‘A woman. Roxanne. She was in the house that night. She appeared out of nowhere weeks before – showed up at my door with a prepared story. She befriended me. Infiltrated our lives. Our marriage. She and Daniel, they were—’
‘I know about Roxanne.’ He cuts me off. ‘Mysterious woman who appeared out of nowhere, befriended you, seduced your husband. Convenient villain for your story.’ He tilts his head, studying me.
‘Except no one’s seen her since the fire.
No one can find any record of her existence before she showed up at your door.
It’s almost like she was a ghost. Or a lie. ’
‘She was real. She was there that night. She—’
‘Go on, what did she do?’ His voice rises suddenly, sharp as a blade. ‘Start the fire? Trap Daniel in the kitchen? Hold you back while he burned?’
‘No, but—’
‘What exactly did this mysterious woman do that explains why my brother is dead and you’re still breathing?’
The tears come without warning, hot tracks down my face that I can’t stop. The flashlight beam wavers as Harvey moves, throwing wild shadows across the ruins, making the charred walls seem to shift and breathe around us.
‘You don’t understand,’ I whisper. ‘You weren’t there.
You don’t know what it was like. The fire spread so fast – faster than it should have.
One minute we were arguing, the next the whole kitchen was in flames.
Daniel was trying to reach the extinguisher but it was stuck, and the fire was between us, and I couldn’t—’
‘Quiet.’ The word is barely a breath but it silences me completely.
‘Stop telling me the story you’ve told everyone else.
The investigators. The insurance company.
Yourself.’ He steps closer. I can feel the heat of his anger radiating off him like its own kind of fire.
‘I don’t want the rehearsed version. I don’t want the narrative you’ve polished until all the sharp edges are gone. ’
His hands close around my arms, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.
‘I want the truth, Kelly. The real truth. The one you’ve never told anyone.’
I stare at him – at Daniel’s brother, at this man who has spent months hunting me, who has destroyed my fragile new life piece by piece, who has brought me back to this place of ash and death to extract a confession.
‘Tell me.’ His voice is laced with an angry hiss, somehow more frightening than his shouting. ‘Tell me what you did. The truth.’
The ruins press in around us. The smell of old smoke fills my lungs. And somewhere deep inside me, something cracks open – the wall I’ve built between myself and the truth, finally giving way.
He deserves to know.
Shouldn’t I tell him?
Maybe I deserve to tell him.
I clear my throat.
Hesitate…