Page 83 of Rich Little Liars

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?

31

NOW

Three days pass before they let me out of bed.

Three days of beeping machines and bland food and nurses who check on me not nearly often enough. Three days of staring at ceiling tiles and replaying everything in my head – the collapse, the confession, the moment I turned back instead of walking away.

On the fourth morning, a doctor with tired eyes and a clipboard tells me I’m healing well. The shoulder is back in its socket, strapped and immobilised. The ribs will hurt for weeks but they’re knitting together properly. The concussion has faded to a dull headache that painkillers can manage. I’m lucky, she says. That word again. Lucky.

I don’t feel lucky.