Page 75 of Rich Little Liars

The words form in my throat but won’t come out.

I can feel them there – the truth, the confession, everything I’ve been carrying since that night – pressing against my tongue. But at the last moment, some survival instinct kicks in, and my mouth closes around nothing.

Harvey’s grip tightens on my arms.

‘I said tell me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You can. You will.’ His face is inches from mine, so close I can see the pulse jumping in his temple. The flashlight catches his features from below, throwing shadows that distort and shift, and for one terrible moment I see Daniel looking back at me. The same jawline. The same set to the brow. Brothers, separated by fifteen years and bitterness, but the resemblance is there in every angle. In every furious line.

‘I’ve waited months for this, Kelly. Months. Do you have any idea what that’s like? Knowing your brother was murdered and watching his killer walk free?’

‘I didn’t murder him.’

‘Then what would you call standing there while he burned? While he screamed for help and you did nothing?’

Something groans beneath us. Low, almost subsonic – the kind of noise you feel in your bones rather than hear. The floor here isn’t solid. It’s a patchwork of charred joists and fire-weakened supports. I file this away somewhere in the depths of my mind, beneath the more immediate terror of the gun aimed at me.

‘The notes,’ I say, grasping for anything that might keep him talking. Might buy time. ‘Why do it that way? The letters, the ring, Richard… Why not just confront me from the start?’

Something flickers across his face. Satisfaction, maybe.

Or the pleasure of explaining his own cleverness.

‘Because I wanted you to suffer first,’ he says, bordering on proud. ‘I wanted you to feel what I felt. That creeping dread. That constant awareness that someone knows your secret. That any moment, everything you’ve built could come crashing down.’

‘So you wanted me scared.’

‘I wanted you terrified. Jumping at shadows. Checking locks at stupid o’clock in the morning. Lying awake wondering when the axe would fall.’ His lips curve into a wry smile. ‘Living in the same nightmare I’ve been living since I got the call about the fire. And then I swooped in as the kind officer who wanted to help. The one person you could trust.’

I muse over the past weeks. The escalating fear. The sleepless nights. The way I’d slowly unravelled until I barely recognised myself in the mirror. He’d engineered all of it. Watched me fall apart from a distance, savouring every crack in my composure.

‘And Richard? Just collateral damage?’

‘Yes, but also a message. That I could reach you anywhere. That no one around you was safe.’ He shrugs, casual, like we’re discussing traffic. ‘I didn’t mean for him to get hurt so badly. He tried to play hero. These things happen.’

‘He might die.’

‘Then his blood is on your hands, not mine. If you’d just confessed from the start, none of this would have been necessary.’

The gun barrel finds my throat again. Not firing – not yet – but could at any moment. Cold metal presses against my warm skin. No chance of missing at this distance. My whole body has gone rigid, every muscle locked against the gun, against the man holding it, against the ruins closing in around us.

‘No more stalling,’ he says. ‘What happened that night? What did you do?’

‘I told you. The fire started accidentally. Roxanne was there⁠—’

‘Roxanne doesn’t exist!’ His voice rises to a shout, bouncing off the broken walls. ‘I’ve searched every database. Every record. No Roxanne matching your description anywhere. No employment history. No rental agreements. No bank accounts. Nothing. She’s a fiction you invented to explain away your own guilt.’

‘She was real.’ I want to show him some text messages, but the phones are gone.

‘Then where is she now? If she was so instrumental in what happened, why hasn’t anyone seen her since?’

I don’t have an answer. The question has haunted me too – where Roxanne went, whether she even survived that night. I remember her face through the flames, that strange smile, and then… nothing. Just smoke and screaming and the ceiling coming down.

‘I don’t know,’ I whisper.

‘Because she was never there. Because you started that fire yourself. You saw a way out of a marriage that had become inconvenient, and you took it.’