Page 113 of The New House

‘He’s OK. You got him out. You saved his life, Harper.’

‘Peter,’ she says again.

I lean in close.

‘Peter … pushed … us.’

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 tohelp. I heard Harper tell you Stacey tried to stop her rescuing me,’ I add firmly. ‘That’swhat 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,wearen’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 Ibeghim, 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 fromthe 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 sonis 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.

And if I want to save my son, I can’t ever tell anyone.

part four

chapter 69

millie

I can’t believe how tall Peter is. It’s a renewed shock every time I see him these days, as if unconsciously I carry around an image of him at ten years old in my head. I remember my own irritation at my grandparents’ and my parents’ friends’ refrain every time they saw me –Haven’t you grown! –and bite back the words.

He was a beautiful boy, and now at nineteen he’s grown into an exceptionally handsome young man. His honey-coloured hair still flops beguilingly across those clear, untroubled tawny eyes. His mouth is soft and full, his smile when he sees me wide and joyous. But there’s a squareness to his jaw now, a firmness, an integrity: he has an old-fashioned, rugged masculinity that puts me in mind of bygone movie stars like Burt Lancaster or, more recently, Daniel Craig. There’s nothing metrosexual or ambiguous about Peter.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d make it,’ he says, putting down his book. ‘We were about to give up on you.’

‘I was in theatre,’ I say. ‘There were a few complications.’

‘How did it go?’

‘It went well,’ I say, dropping my coat over the back of a chair, and sitting on the sofa opposite him. The window near me is open, and I can smell the scent of roses and mown grass. ‘I have a new resident.Apollo. He’s very gifted. He has an instinct you can’t teach.’

Peter’s mouth quirks. ‘Apollo?’

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