be comedic if these were different circumstances.
‘What’s happened?’ she whispers.
‘He tried to kill me.’
‘Who?’
‘Patrick. My husband! He tried to kill me. He wants me dead and I don’t know why!’ I start sobbing now.
Fiona continues to stand in my doorway as if she’s glued to the floor, unable to move. Why isn’t she saying anything? I am shaking like a leaf, but Fiona is a statue.
‘We need to call the police. An ambulance, too. I think I killed him. I stabbed him in the eye.’ My voice cracks. I look at my hands, stained with blood. And still Fiona doesn’t move.
‘What?’ she gasps.
‘We need to call the police!’ I squeeze past her and hurry towards the kitchen, my feet leaving muddy footprints behind me. She follows then, with heavy footsteps. I look at my beautiful designer kitchen, so picture-book perfect. How can so much horror have happened in this house? To me? To us? It simply doesn’t make sense. I reach the phone, pick it up.
‘No!’ Fiona screams.
I swivel to stare at her.
‘L-let me do it!’ she stammers, grabbing the phone from my shaking hand. ‘Sit down. Now!’
‘Why?’ She isn’t making sense. We need help now.
I put my arm out to take the phone back off her, but she turns to face me, her lips thin and tight. ‘Just do it! I need time to think!’
‘You? Why do you need to think? We have to call the police! Now!’
Fiona is shaking her head vigorously, as if she’s trying to shake off an insistent fly. ‘I know what I’m doing,’ she says. Her voice is deeper than normal, but it’s the look in her eyes that frightens me. As if she knows something that I don’t. As if the horror that has just unfolded is her horror, not mine.
‘You’re bleeding,’ she says, pointing at my hand.
Fiona is right. My hand is cut, yet I don’t know how that happened. I don’t feel any pain. The agony is in my heart.
‘I’m going to tend to your wounds, and then we’ll call an ambulance. The police.’
With the phone firmly clutched in her right hand, she grabs one of my kitchen chairs.
‘Sit,’ she says.
‘But we need to call them now.’ My voice cracks, and the sheer terror of what has just happened makes my knees give way. I crumple onto the chair she pulls out for me. Her eyes are darting backwards and forwards, as if the danger is here.
‘He’s dead,’ I say again quietly. ‘Or if he’s not dead, he must be blind.’
‘No!’ Fiona’s voice pierces my head. She swivels quickly, and, chucking the phone onto the granite workshop, she lunges for a knife.
And then it hits me. Fiona isn’t taking the knife to protect us, she’s going to use it. On me. Why do we keep knife blocks out on kitchen surfaces? It’s as if we’re saying to strangers, Come and help yourself. Take one of my knives. Kill me with it. It’s fine, I’ll make it easy for you.
‘What are you doing?’ I cower away from her.
She takes a step towards me. I don’t recognise this woman. Her eyes are pale, icy blue and her teeth are bared. ‘All of this money. This obscene wealth. It isn’t yours! It belongs to Patrick, you bitch!’
‘What?’
The carving knife is just centimetres from my face now.
‘Everything belongs to Patrick. He is Adam’s brother! I can’t believe you never worked that out.’
She laughs then, a bitter, cruel-edged laugh more like the cackle of a hyena. ‘We wondered if you’d ever notice the similarities between Adam and Patrick. But you didn’t, did you? Too self-absorbed.’ She waves the knife again, just millimetres from my face. ‘They say people go for the same type, and you fell hook, line and sinker. You made it so easy for us, Lydia. Your desperation for a bit of attention; flattery from a good-looking man.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say.
‘Patrick is Adam’s half-brother.’
‘But Adam didn’t have any siblings.’
‘Patrick and Adam have the same father. The bastard of a man who cast Patrick and his mother aside. The result of an affair that ruined the poor woman’s life. He refused to recognise Patrick during his lifetime, but Patrick thought that when he died, his father would leave him half of his estate. But no. Patrick got nothing. It all went to Adam, and you. Patrick asked Adam to share his inheritance, but Adam told him to go to hell. And you. We tried to come up with ways to avoid you having to