chapter 68

millie

‘You heard what Harper said,’ Tom says, appalled. ‘We can’t just ignore it.’

‘Peter says it was an accident,’ I say. ‘They were fighting together at the top of the steps. He was trying to help. I heard Harper tell you Stacey tried to stop her rescuing me,’ I add firmly. ‘That’s what I heard.’

Tom insists we have to speak up, to tell the police everything that happened, leave nothing out. Even if Peter was just a bystander, even if he’s incapable of understanding what he did was wrong, Tom says, we aren’t.

But Harper is dying, and no one is left who knows the whole truth but us.

And Tom loves me. He loves me unconditionally, and so when I ask him to protect Peter in these last few moments before the police get here, when I beg him, he agrees.

So we show the police the cellar where Stacey kept her husband chained in the dark for five weeks. They see the chest freezer where she left our son to die. They find my severed fingers on the floor. We tell them what happened, and all of it is true. Every word of it true.

But it isn’t the whole truth. Even Tom doesn’t know that.

I look at my son now as he sits between us in the back of the police car taking us home from the hospital, where one of my colleagues patched up my ruined hand as best she could. I have more surgeries ahead of me, many more surgeries, and physical therapy, and even then I may never regain full use of my hand. I will certainly never operate again. So I look at my son, the child for whom I’ve sacrificed my career and a large part of who I am. And I wonder if I made the right decision.

Because in the chaos and confusion of the police and paramedics’ arrival, as Tom explained to them what’d happened and I waved off medical attention and insisted they tried to save Harper first, somehow we lost sight of Peter.

I found him in the kitchen. He didn’t notice me come up the stairs, and I stood there for a moment, watching him pour the contents of a Coke can into Stacey’s empty coffee mug beside the sink, before crushing the can flat and shoving it in his pocket.

And I knew in that instant there was only one reason he’d do that.

My son is the one who put drain cleaner in a Coke can and gave it to Felix. And then he put what was left into a coffee mug Stacey had used, a coffee mug with her lipstick on the rim and her fingerprints on the side.

My son killed Felix in cold blood. He pushed Harper and Stacey down the cellar stairs so no one would find out the truth.