And with that, an overwhelming rage boils up inside her that—after almost twelve months of torture, rape, and abuse—he gets to blame any of this on her.
Without a second thought, she dips to the floor, grabs the nearest object, a wrought-iron umbrella stand, and runs full pelt at Simon, leveraging it with every ounce of momentum that her frame can muster.
The heavy metal connects hard with Simon’s chin, the sound of metal hitting bone and teeth.
Simon is knocked back hard. He stumbles back toward the three kitchen steps.
He grabs the balustrade instinctively to catch his fall but she sees it coming and the second monstrous blow lands with a wet crunch on his hand, smashing bone, his grip releasing. He continues to fall back, grasping out for purchase, as he crashes down the three steps from hallway to kitchen, his head connecting first with the doorframe, and then with the kitchen’s stone floor, with one wet smack.
Anna stares at his unmoving form for a moment, then turns back to the front door. She needs to get out of here before he gets up, but he has the keys.
She looks down at Simon’s pockets.
Like a nightmare, she imagines him bursting back up and grabbing her as she reaches for them. She is crying now, with deep, body-quaking sobs.
She can’t have that, not ever.
She tightens her grip on the metal stand and moves over to him, straddles his prone form, and brings the stand down one last time on his nose, his face, smashing the delicate, handsome features that she fell in love with.
She collapses onto his static body, trembling hands searching his pockets for keys. She does not notice the sounds coming from the front of the house now, the people shouting, the banging. Behind her the front door implodes, uniformed police swarm in, and, like in a delirious dream, hands tear her from Simon’s barely breathing body.
She lets them, allowing herself to become soft once more.The cat came through, she thinks to herself.The fucking cat saved me.
Saved by the cat.
She starts to giggle, then the giggles turn into a laugh, before slipping into heaving, shuddering gasps.
She is alive and she is free.
Day Nine
Chapter 53
After
Frankie wakes to the sightof a soft-featured nurse changing her drip bag, the glistening liquid inside filled with glittering bubbles that refract like jewels in the hospital light. All of that liquid, she notes, will soon be traveling into her aching body through a thin plastic tube.
That string of thoughts alone, disjointed and beautiful, is enough to tell Frankie that the drugs Simon flooded her body with have still not fully flushed through her system yet.
The nurse offers to get her some breakfast. Frankie’s stomach gurgles loudly, her last meal having been before heading to Matt’s house on Sunday afternoon. That meal, along with everything Simon drugged her with, was pumped from her body as soon as she reached the hospital.
There is a swell of guilt over Matt, when her thoughts land on him. That she had been so sure he had Anna, so sure that she had sent DI Cobham to his house, granted it was to his renovation house, not his actual home, but still. She had been so sure when she’d sent that email.
Frankie shifts in the bed, feeling having returned to her now, but with feeling came the ache of her bruises, the throb of her head, and the excruciating kidney and muscle pain the overdose Simon had given her had caused.
Frankie recalls DI Cobham visiting her hospital room the previous evening, at least a portion of it; he had questions that weretime-sensitive to the case. She gave him the passcodes for the stored cat camera videos on her online account, he called it in, then sat and talked her through the events of Monday morning.
They had broken Matt’s renovation house’s front door. He of course had not been there but oblivious in his own home. They had found the cinema room and two empty unrenovated bathrooms. They had begun to spread out and search the neighboring buildings.
Screams were heard coming from a house two down from 65 Locksheath Road. Entry was forced and Simon had been apprehended; Anna was safe but in hospital.
Frankie had asked if Anna had been taken to the same hospital as her but DI Cobham was not at liberty to tell her.
But Frankie feels a rush of vindication, like no other, a burst of joyful relief that stays with her because she finally knows Anna is safe, that everything that occurred over the last eight days was worth it, that she hadn’t gone mad, that she wasn’t alone, that Anna is free.
Some of the things DI Cobham has told her are lost to Frankie’s mind for now, a soupy mixture of swirling images.
Pam had come, at some point. Arabella too, flowing with apologies and promises for the future. And Aoife, with her driver, carrying a display of flowers larger than the bedside unit would allow, forcing Aoife to position them in an area that blocked a large section of the view from the wide fifth-floor window of her room. She held Frankie’s hand; she told Frankie what they had done when they found her, and though Frankie slipped in and out of following her words, she felt held by them.
