Chapter 60
TOM
I don’t know how long I stand there, feeling the room tilt, like a hand has tipped a glass and everything inside wants to spill.
I can’t move.
The sound has stopped—the screaming, the scuffling, the thud of bodies—and in its place there’s just this awful, swollen silence.
James is on the floor, a heap of flesh, his limbs twisted at angles that don’t make sense. His eyes are still open, catching the kitchen light in a way that makes it hard to tell if he’s looking at me or through me.
There’s blood — so much blood — pooling and spreading, tracing the cracks between the tiles, creeping toward my shoes. My chest won’t expand; the air feels heavy, like I’m breathing through cloth.
Part of me is waiting for him to move — for his chest to rise, for him to cough, to swear, to prove the world hasn’t tilted this far. But he doesn’t. He just lies there, eyes glazed, mouth slightly open.
I realise, with a hollow sort of clarity, that there’s no coming back from this — for him, or for any of us.
Emma has become a tornado of motion. She’s on the other side of the room — hands to her face, then twisting her hair, then that sudden, ferocious stillness when she realises the practicalities of themoment. She keeps glancing at James’s body with that expression that’s a mixture of terror and calculation.
I turn to Pete, who’s pressed into the corner of the kitchen. His eye unfocused as if someone has left a light on inside his head and it’s blinking too fast. He’s breathing, but it’s the shallow, mechanical kind that makes you think the thing inside him is on standby rather than alive.
I don’t know what to do about James’s body. But Pete, Pete I can help. I rush to him. “Are you ok?”
He doesn’t respond, his eyes still glazed over. I grip his arm and lift him. He is heavier than I expect, not in muscle but in absence. I guide him to the sofa and sit him down like he’s a person I’m borrowing for a minute.
“Wine,” he says. One word. Not a request. A flat instruction.
Rather than question his request, I move on autopilot. I grab a glass and bottle of red already open on the side. Pouring him a large glass. I hand it to him because it’s something to do, a gesture that says I am still here, He takes it, brings it to his lips, and for the first time his fingers actually register as fingers, gripping the stem like someone trying to remember how to hold a life.
I turn to Emma. “Are you okay?”
She nods.
“We need to call the police,” I say. Of course I do.
“No,” Emma says, flat and fast. She turns and looks at me as if I’ve suggested we bring in a circus. “We can’t call the police.”
My shoulders give a small, reflexive shrug of disbelief. “What — what do you mean? He’s dead, we have to.”
“We pinned him down. Tom, we need to—”
“It was self-defence. He was coming for all of us. He had a knife.”
“It will look like murder,” she tells me.
“It wasn’t murder!”
“We pinned him down and stabbed him.”
“You stabbed him!” I fire back and instantly regret it. This isn’t the time to turn against each other.
“It was an accident!” Emma fires back.
“Exactly!”
Her eyes glitter with tears but there’s an edge to them that is not sorrow so much as a cold arithmetic: risk, exposure, consequence.
“They won’t see it that way. Not with me, I know what they will say.”
