Page 92 of The New House

‘You said it wasn’t safe to go home.’

‘Well, after a week living with you, it’s a chance I’m willing to take.’

‘You’d send me back to thattinyflat just days afteropen heart surgerywith two little boys and a husband I haven’t shared a bed with in nearly a month, a husband withneeds—’

Harper is like a psychotic savant: she knows exactly which buttons to press. ‘Fine,’ I sigh.

She grabs her white leather bomber jacket and follows me out to the car. ‘It’s not that I don’t love Kyle,’ she says. ‘But we’ve been together since I was fifteen. That’s, like, almost half mylife. I mean, you can have eggs for breakfast every day, you can reallyloveeggs, eggs can be totally yourthing, but sometimes you just don’t want to see another egg in your life, you know?’

‘Please stop.’

‘I’m not ready to go back home,’ she says.

‘That much is obvious,’ I observe. ‘But you can’t stay with me forever, Harper.’

‘I know.’

She struggles with her seatbelt, and I lean across to help her with it. ‘Your incision is still healing,’ I say. ‘You really should be resting.’

She puts her hand on mine as I click the belt home. ‘It’s not really about Kyle,’ she says.

The intensity of her tone gives me pause. ‘Then whatisit about?’

‘I’d give my life for my boys,’ she says fiercely. ‘I love them to death, they’re my world, but sometimes I just feel like I can’tbreathe.They need me so much. Not just to do stuff for them, the cooking and things, I can live with all that, but I don’t just have to keepthemsafe, do I?’ She releases my hand suddenly. ‘I have to keepmesafe too, and the responsibility of that – ever since the accident it’s like there’s been this tight band round my chest and I can’t seem to get any air. I feel like I’m drowning. Loving them is … it’skillingme.’

There’s a sudden silence in the car. Something passes between us: a moment of shared recognition that knits us together like bone. Motherhood means living simultaneously in joy and desperation. When I got pregnant with Meddie, my biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to love her. It never occurred to me that loving her too much would be what nearly crushed me.

‘They’d survive,’ I say gently, ‘if anything happened to you. Children are resilient. You and I are living proof of that.’

‘I want my boys to do more than justsurvive.’

‘I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Harper.’

‘You can’t make promises like that. Stacey tried tokillme.’

‘Did she?’ I say quietly. ‘Or did you just need a reason not to go home?’

The lights change and I turn onto the Fulham Road, overtaking a black cab stopping for a fare and slotting neatly behind a bus. The taxi driver gives me the finger.

‘You don’t believe me,’ Harper says flatly.

I feel a brief, unexpected flicker of regret as the moment of understanding between us breaks and we retreat to our own sides of the divide.

‘You lied to me before,’ I say. ‘You said you didn’t know who was in the car that hit you. You only told me it was Stacey when I said it was time for you to go home.’

‘ItwasStacey,’ she says.

‘Then I believe you. Stop talking and put the address in the sat-nav,’ I say. ‘We don’t have much time.’

Stacey isn’t going to sit on her hands and wait to see how things play out. She knows that without a body the police don’t have enough to charge me, or they’d have done it already. She has to box me into a corner from which there’s no coming back.

Gambling is in my nature. And it’s in Stacey’s, too. Neither of us is in the habit of playing it safe. We both have incriminating video of each other: in theory, our mutually assured destruction should keep us both safe. But I guarantee she’ll roll the dice anyway and give the police the CCTV footage of me breaking into her house and her husband’s office, calculating I’ll be arrested before I have a chance to mount an attack. It’s what I’d do.

She never needed the house deeds, of course. It was a set-up to give her video that’d make me look guilty, and it was a brilliant move. I was so invested in her domestic abuse narrative I never stopped to question why she needed the deeds so urgently. I didn’t question anything. Even when I hacked into Felix’s desktop camera I was trying to find something that’dhelpher.

I’ve probably got a few hours at most before the police arrest me. The video I have of Stacey attacking her husband is suggestive, but it’s nowhere near enough to get me off the hook. I need more ammunition if I’m to persuade the police to take Stacey seriously as a suspect. And Harper’s ridiculous Kyper Nation may just have secured it for me.

The girl has more than two million followers. That’s two million pairs of eyes looking for Felix Porter; Stacey Porter’s name on two million lips. Stacey’s kept her secrets hidden for nearly twenty years, but even she couldn’t bury them deep enough to survive that kind of scrutiny.

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