Chapter 27
NOW
The words form in my throat but won’t come out.
I can feel them there – the truth, the confession, everything I’ve been carrying since that night – pressing against my tongue. But at the last moment, some survival instinct kicks in, and my mouth closes around nothing.
Harvey’s grip tightens on my arms.
‘I said tell me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can. You will.’ His face is inches from mine, so close I can see the pulse jumping in his temple.
The flashlight catches his features from below, throwing shadows that distort and shift, and for one terrible moment I see Daniel looking back at me.
The same jawline. The same set to the brow.
Brothers, separated by fifteen years and bitterness, but the resemblance is there in every angle. In every furious line.
‘I’ve waited months for this, Kelly. Months. Do you have any idea what that’s like? Knowing your brother was murdered and watching his killer walk free?’
‘I didn’t murder him.’
‘Then what would you call standing there while he burned? While he screamed for help and you did nothing?’
Something groans beneath us. Low, almost subsonic – the kind of noise you feel in your bones rather than hear.
The floor here isn’t solid. It’s a patchwork of charred joists and fire-weakened supports.
I file this away somewhere in the depths of my mind, beneath the more immediate terror of the gun aimed at me.
‘The notes,’ I say, grasping for anything that might keep him talking. Might buy time. ‘Why do it that way? The letters, the ring, Richard… Why not just confront me from the start?’
Something flickers across his face. Satisfaction, maybe.
Or the pleasure of explaining his own cleverness.
‘Because I wanted you to suffer first,’ he says, bordering on proud. ‘I wanted you to feel what I felt. That creeping dread. That constant awareness that someone knows your secret. That any moment, everything you’ve built could come crashing down.’
‘So you wanted me scared.’
‘I wanted you terrified. Jumping at shadows. Checking locks at stupid o’clock in the morning.
Lying awake wondering when the axe would fall.
’ His lips curve into a wry smile. ‘Living in the same nightmare I’ve been living since I got the call about the fire.
And then I swooped in as the kind officer who wanted to help. The one person you could trust.’
I muse over the past weeks. The escalating fear. The sleepless nights. The way I’d slowly unravelled until I barely recognised myself in the mirror. He’d engineered all of it. Watched me fall apart from a distance, savouring every crack in my composure.
‘And Richard? Just collateral damage?’
‘Yes, but also a message. That I could reach you anywhere. That no one around you was safe.’ He shrugs, casual, like we’re discussing traffic. ‘I didn’t mean for him to get hurt so badly. He tried to play hero. These things happen.’
‘He might die.’
‘Then his blood is on your hands, not mine. If you’d just confessed from the start, none of this would have been necessary.’
The gun barrel finds my throat again. Not firing – not yet – but could at any moment.
Cold metal presses against my warm skin.
No chance of missing at this distance. My whole body has gone rigid, every muscle locked against the gun, against the man holding it, against the ruins closing in around us.
‘No more stalling,’ he says. ‘What happened that night? What did you do?’
‘I told you. The fire started accidentally. Roxanne was there—’
‘Roxanne doesn’t exist!’ His voice rises to a shout, bouncing off the broken walls.
‘I’ve searched every database. Every record.
No Roxanne matching your description anywhere.
No employment history. No rental agreements.
No bank accounts. Nothing. She’s a fiction you invented to explain away your own guilt. ’
‘She was real.’ I want to show him some text messages, but the phones are gone.
‘Then where is she now? If she was so instrumental in what happened, why hasn’t anyone seen her since?’
I don’t have an answer. The question has haunted me too – where Roxanne went, whether she even survived that night. I remember her face through the flames, that strange smile, and then… nothing. Just smoke and screaming and the ceiling coming down.
‘I don’t know,’ I whisper.
‘Because she was never there. Because you started that fire yourself. You saw a way out of a marriage that had become inconvenient, and you took it.’
‘No—’
‘Dead rich husbands don’t fight for assets. Don’t demand explanations. Don’t make you feel guilty for your failures.’
‘That’s not—’
‘Admit it!’ He’s screaming now, his composure finally cracking. Spittle flecks his lips. His eyes are wild, desperate – Daniel’s eyes, I think suddenly, the same warm brown that used to look at me with love, then confusion, then that terrible distance. ‘Say you killed him!’
The floor shifts beneath us – a proper movement this time, not just protesting. I feel the joist beneath my right foot dip, then stabilise. The sensation sends fresh panic spiking through me, layered on top of everything else.
‘Harvey, the floor isn’t—’
‘I don’t care about the goddamn floor!’ But I see fear flicker in his eyes, just for a moment, before rage swallows it again. ‘Not until you tell me the truth!’
The gun barrel digs harder. The pain is sharp but distant, less real than the pressure building in my chest. The terror that’s been my constant companion for weeks has become pure and cold. This is it, I realise. This is how it ends.
In the same place where Daniel died, with his brother’s gun at my throat.
‘Say it,’ he hisses. ‘Say what you did, or I’ll cut your throat right now and we’ll both go down together.’
I look at him – really look, past the rage and the grief to the man underneath.
He’s destroyed himself for this. Spent ages planning, watching, waiting.
Thrown away his career, his integrity, everything he built as Joseph Harvey rather than Joseph Reynolds.
All for a brother he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years.
All for answers that won’t bring Daniel back.
I hate him. God, I hate him for what he’s done to me. For Richard bleeding in a hospital bed. For the weeks of terror that stripped me down to bone, and for dragging me back to this house of ash.
But looking into those eyes – Daniel’s eyes in a stranger’s face – I feel something else too.
Something unexpected. He’s wrong about me.
Wrong about so many things. But he’s also a man who loved his brother.
Who couldn’t let go of an unfortunate death.
Who needed answers badly enough to burn down his own life chasing them.
I’m sorry, I think, though I don’t know who I’m apologising to any more. Him. Daniel.
Myself.
I’m sorry for all of it.
I didn’t want Daniel to die. Despite everything.
And something in me gives up.
‘I didn’t kill him.’
I say it quietly. Final. Defeated. Harvey’s expression twists with fresh fury, but I keep talking before he can interrupt.
‘I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t have saved him. By the time I understood what was happening, the flames were everywhere. There was no path through. No way to reach him. The fire had already spread too far, too fast.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not.’ Tears are streaming down my face now. Hot and shameful and unstoppable. ‘I didn’t save him. But that’s not why I feel guilty. That’s not why I can’t sleep. That’s not why I smell smoke everywhere I go and see his face whenever I close my eyes.’
Harvey has gone still. The gun is still pointed into me, but the pressure has eased, if only a little. He’s listening now. Actually listening.
‘Then why? If you couldn’t have saved him, why do you feel so guilty?’
The floor groans again – a low, threatening sound that seems to come from everywhere at once.
Neither of us moves.
‘Because I didn’t try.’ The confession tears out of me like something being ripped free. ‘The flames were too high, the heat was too intense, but I didn’t even try. I just stood there. Frozen. Watching.’
I’m sobbing now. Ugly, wrenching sobs that shake my whole body.
‘And the worst part – the thing I’ve never told anyone, the thing I can barely admit to myself – is that part of me was glad.’
The word hovers between us. Obscene.
Unforgivable.
‘I watched my husband burning alive, and somewhere inside me, this small, horrible part felt relieved. Felt like it was justice. For what he did with Roxanne. For the months of gaslighting, of making me feel crazy, of choosing her over me. I stood there and I watched him die and I thought: good. He deserves this. He deserves to burn.’
The tears won’t stop. My voice has broken into something raw and terrible.
‘I didn’t kill Daniel. I couldn’t have saved him even if I’d tried. But I wanted him dead. I wanted it and then it happened and I was happy. What kind of person does that make me? What kind of monster stands there watching their husband burn and feels glad?’
Harvey stares at me. His expression has transformed into something I can’t read – not triumph, not satisfaction. Something emptier. Hollower. Like a man who’s finally caught the thing he was chasing and found it wasn’t what he expected.
‘You wanted him to die,’ he says slowly. Testing the words.
‘Yes.’
‘You watched him burn and you felt relieved.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t…’ He trails off. The gun waves in front of my face.
‘I didn’t start the fire. Not on purpose anyway.
I didn’t trap him. I didn’t do anything except stand there and feel things no wife should ever feel about her husband.
’ I meet his eyes – Daniel’s eyes, full of confusion now instead of rage.
‘I’m not a murderer, Joseph. I’m something worse.
I’m a woman who got exactly what she wanted and has to live with that knowledge every single day. ’
The floor shifts again beneath us. More pronounced this time. A crack runs through the charred boards near my feet, spreading slowly outward like a dark vein.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘I’m so sorry.’
But I’m not talking to Harvey any more.
I’m talking to Daniel. To the ghost of a man who died screaming while his wife stood frozen with hatred in her heart.
To the memory of someone who was flawed and cruel but didn’t deserve to burn.
To the brother standing before me now, his whole body rigid with grief and confusion and perhaps the first stirrings of doubt.
Could it be that he finally understood I didn’t mean for any of this? That it was simply an accident?
I’m sorry, I think again, looking at those familiar brown eyes.
I’m sorry for what I felt. I’m sorry for what it made you become.
I’m sorry I can’t give you the confession you wanted, the neat story of murder and justice.
I can only give you this: the truth of a woman who hated her husband enough to feel relief when he died.
I’m sorry it isn’t enough.
The floor gives one final, shuddering groan.
And then it collapses entirely.