Page 79 of Rich Little Liars

I slept poorly – kept waking to unfamiliar sounds, the groaning of a house I didn’t know yet – but even the sleeplessness felt different here. Cleaner somehow. Like the insomnia of anticipation rather than dread.

In the morning, I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window watching the town wake up. I witnessed normal life. The kind of life I’d always watched from the outside, never quite believing I could have it for myself.

Now I could.

Now I did.

I just had to make sure no one ever discovered I didn’t deserve it.

The first couple of days in East Hampton were an exercise in solitude. I kept to myself mostly, nodding at neighbours but not engaging, establishing myself as a quiet presence rather than a social one. The grieving widow who needed space. Who wasn’t ready for brunch gatherings and book clubs and all the rituals of town life.

Not yet.

I walked the park each morning, learning its rhythms. Which houses had dogs. Which had children. Which curtains twitched when I passed. I was mapping the territory, memorising the patterns, preparing for the day when I would step fully into this new life and claim my place among these people.

But for now, distance was safer.

Distance gave me room to adjust. To refine.

To become.

The silence was the strangest part. I hadn’t expected it to feel so physical – a presence rather than an absence. It filled the rooms of my new house like something liquid, pooling in corners and collecting beneath high ceilings. At first it felt oppressive. All those empty hours with nothing but my own thoughts for company. No voices. No interruptions. No one asking questions or making demands or needing anything from me at all.

Just silence. Vast and echoing and complete.

But slowly, I began to crave it. To sink into it like a bath. There was something intoxicating about being so utterly alone – no one watching, no one judging, no one expecting me to perform. In the silence, I could simply exist. Could let the mask slip for hours at a time.

The silence held me. Cradled me. Became a kind of companion in itself.

And yet, there were moments – late at night, usually – when the silence turned on me. When it stopped feeling like peace and started feeling like punishment. In those hours, every thought I’d been avoiding would surface. Every memory I’d buried would claw its way back up. The silence gave me nowhere to hide from myself. Nowhere to run from the questions that circled like sharks in dark water.

I learned to manage it. To fill the worst hours with small tasks – folding laundry, reorganising cupboards, walking the same route around the park until my legs ached. Movement helped. Activity helped. Anything that kept the mind occupied and the silence from turning predatory.

But I never quite escaped it. Never quite stopped being aware of how alone I was.

The silence knew what I’d done.

The silence remembered.

29

NOW

The world disappears beneath me.

One moment I’m standing on charred boards, tears streaming down my face, Harvey’s gun aimed at my throat. The next, there’s nothing but air and darkness and the terrible sensation of falling with no idea where the ground is.

We hit something hard. Not the ground – an intermediate floor, maybe, some crawl space or cellar level that survived the fire but not the weeks of rot that followed. The impact drives the breath from my lungs. I hear Harvey grunt somewhere to my left, debris raining down around us. The groan of timber that’s been asked to bear weight it was never meant to hold.

Dust billows up in choking clouds. I can’t see. Can’t breathe. Can only lie here in the dark, every part of my body screaming with fresh pain, waiting to find out if I’m still alive or if this is what death feels like – this endless falling, this suffocating darkness, this sense that everything solid has given way beneath me.

Something shifts above us. A deep, ominous creak that seems to come from the bones of the house itself. The walls are moving. I can feel it through the rubble I’m lying on – vibrations travelling through stone and timber, the whole structure adjusting to its new reality. We’ve broken something fundamental. Knocked out some load-bearing element that was holding the ruins together through sheer stubbornness.

Now everything is coming down.

I force myself to move. Every muscle protests. My shoulder feels wrong, twisted, and there’s blood running down my face, but I push up onto my hands and knees anyway. The dust starts to settle, revealing shapes in the darkness. Broken beams. Shattered brick. The jagged outline of the hole we fell through, a few metres above us.

And Harvey.