Chapter 30
NOW
The first thing I’m aware of is beeping.
Steady. Rhythmic. The heartbeat of machines that have decided I’m worth monitoring.
It takes me a long moment to understand what I’m hearing, longer still to connect the sound to the antiseptic smell filling my nostrils, the scratchy sheets beneath my fingers, the dull ache that seems to radiate from everywhere at once.
Hospital.
I’m in hospital.
The realisation filters in slowly, like light through dirty glass.
I try to open my eyes but they’re gummed shut, crusted with something – dust, maybe, or dried tears, or both.
My throat feels like I’ve swallowed gravel.
Maybe I have. When I finally manage to pry my lids apart, the fluorescent lights above me are so bright they make my head throb.
I try to move and immediately regret it. Pain flares through my shoulder, and something pulls at my arm. An IV line, I realise, taped to my hand. There are wires attached to my chest, presumably connected to the beeping machines. A pulse oximeter clips my finger like a tiny plastic claw.
How long have I been here?
The room offers no answers. It’s a standard hospital room – single bed, blue curtains, a window showing grey sky that could be morning or afternoon or any time at all. There’s a plastic chair in the corner, empty, and a small table with a jug of water I desperately want but can’t reach.
I’m trying to work out how to summon a nurse when the door opens.
Two police officers enter. Not Harvey – the thought arrives with a jolt that makes my heart monitor spike – but strangers.
A woman in her forties with close-cropped grey hair and a younger man who looks barely old enough to shave.
Both wear the neutral expressions of people about to deliver news they’ve rehearsed.
‘Ms Reynolds.’ The woman speaks first, her voice professional and gentle. ‘I’m Detective Kirsch. This is Officer Slovis. How are you feeling?’
‘Like a house fell on me.’ My voice is hoarse, and I can barely recognise it as my own. ‘What happened? How did I—’
‘You were pulled from the wreckage early this morning. A neighbour about half a mile away reported hearing what sounded like an explosion. Turned out to be the structure finally giving way.’ Detective Kirsch moves closer, positioning herself where I can see her without straining my neck.
‘We sent a unit to investigate the noise complaint and found the collapse. Search and rescue located you under a section of wall.’
‘You’ve been unconscious for about fourteen hours,’ Officer Slovis adds. ‘The doctors say you have a dislocated shoulder, a concussion, and more bruises than they could count. But nothing life-threatening. You were lucky.’
Lucky. The word feels absurd given the context. But I suppose he’s right. I should be dead. By all rights, I should be buried in that rubble alongside—
‘Harvey,’ I blurt. ‘What about Harvey? Is he…?’
The officers exchange a look. That brief, loaded glance that tells me everything before either of them speaks.
‘I’m sorry,’ Detective Kirsch says. ‘Officer Harvey didn’t survive the collapse. His body was recovered about an hour after you were found.’
I hear the words – understand them – but they don’t seem to connect to anything real. Harvey is dead. The man who terrorised me, who broke into my home and put Richard in hospital, then dragged me back to the ruins of my old life and held a gun at me.
That man is dead.
I should feel something. Relief, maybe. Or satisfaction. Or at least the grim acknowledgement that justice has been served in its own brutal way. But all I can summon is a hollow kind of numbness, like pressing on a bruise that’s gone past pain.
‘Ms Reynolds?’ Officer Slovis has stepped forward, his young face creased with concern. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I don’t know,’ I hear myself say. ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.’
Detective Kirsch nods like this is a reasonable response. Maybe it is. Maybe there’s no right way to react when your would-be murderer dies in the same collapse that almost killed you.
‘We’ll need to take a statement from you,’ she says. ‘About what happened at the property. How you came to be there with Officer Harvey, what occurred before the collapse.’ She pauses. ‘But that can wait until you’re stronger. The doctors want you to rest for now.’
‘A statement.’ I try to process what that means. What I’ll have to tell them. The truth – some version of it, at least – about the notes and the stalking and Harvey’s obsession with his brother’s death. About how he lured me to that house.
But not all of it.
Never all of it.
‘There’s something else you should know,’ Detective Kirsch continues.
‘We found evidence at Officer Harvey’s apartment.
Notes. Photographs. What appears to be months of surveillance on you and your movements.
’ She shakes her head slowly. ‘It seems he developed a fixation after his brother’s death.
Blamed you for what happened, despite the official investigation finding no wrongdoing on your part. ’
‘His brother.’ I let that fact sit there. Let them think I’m only just learning this information. ‘Daniel was his brother?’
‘Half-brother, technically. Different mothers. They’d been estranged for years, but apparently the death affected him more than anyone realised.
’ Detective Kirsch’s tone drops into something more sympathetic.
‘He was a good officer, by all accounts. Respected. No one suspected he was capable of something like this.’
No one ever does, I think. No one suspects until the mask slips and the monster underneath shows its face.
‘The important thing,’ Officer Slovis adds, ‘is that you’re safe now. Whatever he was planning, it’s over.’
Over. Such a simple word for something so complicated.
‘We’ll let you rest,’ Detective Kirsch says, moving towards the door. ‘A family liaison officer will be in touch to arrange your statement. And if you need anything – support services, therapy referrals – we can help facilitate that.’
They’re almost at the door when I summon the courage to ask.
‘Wait.’ They pause. ‘Richard. Richard Bancroft. He was hurt – attacked in my house. Is he…’ My voice breaks. ‘Is he okay?’
Another exchanged look, but this one is different.
Warmer.
‘Dr Bancroft is recovering well,’ Detective Kirsch says. ‘He regained consciousness last night. The doctors are optimistic about his prognosis.’
Last night. While I was sitting in my kitchen letting Harvey play the kind protector. While I was drinking coffee and sharing confidences with the man who’d put Richard in hospital in the first place.
‘Can I see him?’
‘Soon. The doctors want you both to rest first. But I’m told he’s been asking about you.’ A small smile crosses her face. It’s the first genuine expression I’ve seen from her. ‘Quite persistently, apparently.’
Something loosens in my chest. Richard is alive. Richard has been asking about me.
It’s not nothing.
It’s not nothing at all.
The officers leave, and I’m alone with the beeping machines, the grey light, and the strange, hollow feeling that’s taken up residence where my fear used to live.
Harvey is dead.
I keep turning the fact over in my mind, examining it from different angles like a stone I’ve found on a beach.
Harvey is dead. The threat that’s been looming over me for weeks – longer than I even knew – has been removed.
Not by justice or intervention or my own cleverness, but by the same collapsing house that nearly killed me too.
There’s a certain poetry to it, I suppose. The burned house claiming another victim. The ruins reaching up to pull down the man who wouldn’t let them rest. Daniel’s brother joining Daniel in whatever darkness waits on the other side.
Case closed.
Tragedy concluded.
Kelly Reynolds: victim, not villain.
But there’s another part of me – a part I can’t examine too closely – that feels something else entirely. Something that might be grief, or might be guilt, or perhaps even some twisted combination of both.
Because I went back.
I could have left him there. Could have climbed out of that basement and let the house finish what it started. No one would have blamed me. No one would have even known. Just another death in a collapsing structure, tragic but explicable.
But I went back.
That has to count for something…
Doesn’t it?