Page 17 of Rich Little Liars

‘Emma said Caroline was asking questions,’ Richard says after a moment. ‘About your husband and what happened.’

‘She was.’

‘Caroline thinks she’s protecting the town. Making sure everyone who lives here meets her standards.’ He takes a sip of wine. ‘She does mean well, mostly. But she can be intrusive.’

‘She speaks like she has theories.’

‘About the fire?’

I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

Richard is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, it sounds gentle. ‘Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to. But I want you to know – whatever happened, whatever you’re carrying, there’s no need to carry it alone.’

The kindness of it nearly breaks me. I’ve spent months holding everything in, keeping everyone at arm’s length, convinced that letting anyone close would mean losing control. But sitting here in the half-dark with Richard, his presence solid and warm and safe, I feel something inside me loosening.

‘I can’t talk about it,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m sorry. I just… I can’t.’

‘That’s okay.’

‘But you’re being so kind, and I can’t even—’ My voice catches.

Richard moves closer, closing the distance between us. ‘Kelly. You don’t owe me anything. Not explanations, not your story, nothing. I’m here because I want to be. Because I like you. That’s all.’

I look at him then, really look at him. His brown eyes are warm in the lamplight, his expression open and honest. There’s no judgement there. No suspicion. Just concern and something else I can’t quite figure out.

‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Why do you like me? You don’t know anything about me.’

‘I know enough. I know you’re kind. I know you’re trying to build a life here, even though it’s clearly hard for you. I know you’re braver than you think you are.’ He pauses. ‘And I know you’re running from something. But everyone in East Hampton is running from something. That’s why we all ended up here.’

‘Even you?’

‘Especially me.’ He smiles, but there’s sadness in it. ‘I had a whole life in London before this. A wife, a career track at a big hospital, everything mapped out. Then she left, and the career didn’t seem to matter any more, and I realised I’d been performing a life instead of living one. So I came here. Started over.’

‘Does it work? Starting over?’

‘Some days. Other days I wake up and still expect things to go back to normal.’ He shrugs. ‘But it gets easier. The weight of it gets lighter. You learn to carry it differently.’

I think about Daniel. About the weight I’ve been carrying since the fire. About whether it will ever feel lighter or if this is just what life is now – this constant vigilance, this fear of being found out.

‘What if the thing you’re running from catches up?’ I ask.

‘Then you deal with it. You face it, or you run again, or you find some third option you hadn’t considered. But don’t do it alone.’

I want to believe him that there’s a version of this story where I’m not alone with my secrets, where someone knows the truth and stays anyway. But I’ve learned not to trust wants. Wants get you in trouble. Wants are what led me to Daniel in the first place, to that life I thought I wanted, to the choices that ended in flames and sirens.

Still, when Richard reaches out and takes my hand, I don’t pull away.

His palm is warm against mine, his fingers threading through mine with easy familiarity. We sit like that for a long time, not speaking, just breathing in sync. The wine remains untouched. The room is quiet except for the distant sound of wind against windows.

‘I keep smelling smoke,’ I say eventually. The words slip past my defences. ‘Even though there isn’t any. Even though I know it’s not real. I’ll be doing something completely normal and suddenly I can smell it, and I’m back there, and I can’t breathe.’

Richard’s hand tightens around mine. ‘That’s normal. After trauma. Your brain is trying to process what happened. Trust me, I’m a doctor.’

I smile lazily. ‘It doesn’t feel normal. It feels like I’m going insane.’

‘You’re not, I promise.’ He shifts a little, his thumb rubbing my hand. ‘I had a patient once, a firefighter who’d been in a building collapse. Months after he recovered physically, he’d still panic at certain sounds. The creak of metal. The groan of timber under stress. His brain had catalogued those sounds as danger, and it took a long time to untrain that response.’

‘Did he? Untrain it?’