Page 72 of Rich Little Liars

‘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.

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.