While I’d love to stay and watch the entire place burn to the ground, I must be on my way.
Grabbing my purse from the kitchen table, I exit from the farmhouse for the final time, slide into my cold car, and start the engine. I press the seat and steering wheel warmers and let it idle for a bit, checking on my sleeping babies, who are none the wiser.
Someday, when they’re old enough to understand, I’ll tell them all about their father’s deranged first wife, how she faked her disappearance and came back with a vengeance, jealous of his idyllic new life. I’ll tell them how she sneaked into our beautiful farmhouse when we were asleep, tied their father up, and stabbed him in the jugular. With tears in my eyes, I’ll describe in meticulous, heartfelt detail how the three of us narrowly escaped death after Lydia lit a fire in our living room and tried to barricade us inside until I mustered the strength to fight back and get us to safety.
I give the fire a little more time to spread before shifting into reverse and heading to town. According to my GPS, we’re twenty minutes from the police station. By the time I get there, I’ll have my story together.
I dump my phone in a dumpster outside a gas station on the edge of town; that way I can say I had no means to call 911. She took my phone, I’ll tell them. It perished in the fire . . . along with my poor husband. And when they get there and find her dead of smoke inhalation, they’ll rule it a murder-suicide. No questions asked.
Thirty days from now, I’ll submit my claim against the life insurance policy I took out on my husband years ago—the one I purchased just in case.
A precaution of my own.
Because I am—by all accounts—a reasonable woman.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
LYDIA
I wake with a gasping start, my lungs burning. Everything around me is dark, and the smoky scent of fire and ash fills my nostrils. Feeling the ground around me, I slick my hand against the top step in an attempt to get my bearings, but when I push myself up, my head throbs and everything around me turns on its side.
If I crawl down the stairs, I could hurt myself.
But if I stay here, I’ll die.
Consciousness eludes me, my surroundings morphing from gray smog to blackness and back. Between flashes of reality, the furious red-orange glow of flames licks the ceiling above, coming closer, burning hotter, taking no prisoners.
A flame spark drips from the ceiling, landing on the top of my hand, sending a blinding-hot shock of pain across my flesh that almost renders me unconscious again. I jerk my hand away from the hot spot, pressing it against my chest and breathing through the throbbing sting—only every breath suffocates me further, drowning me in smoke.
Stretching my feet, I feel for the top step, and with weak, shaking arms, I slide myself to the first tread. Then another. And another. Gasping for air that never feels like enough, I lose count of the stairs.
Everything around me grows dim, and I’m certain this is it. I’m going to die here, in this house in the middle of nowhere, going down in flames with the devil himself.
Until the woman in white appears—her flowing dress a beacon of hope. Hooking her arms beneath mine, she drags me down the rest of the stairs, across the foyer, and over the threshold of the front door, and she doesn’t stop until we reach a blanket of cool, wintry earth beneath a sky full of stars.
“You’re safe now, angel,” she says. “Help is on the way.”
My eyes sting, and my vision is blurred. Rolling to my side, I cough and gasp and clutch the dormant grass beneath my body like the lifeline it is—like the lifeline it was the first time I almost died.
Crouching beside me is the woman in the white dress, a green-black stone dangling from her neck as she pats my back the way a mother would comfort her child.
I don’t know how; I don’t know why.
Fire roars and crackles from the house as it folds in on itself, one piece of timber at a time. Sirens wail in the distance until they grow so close my ears ache. Everything fades to gray, though for how long, I can’t be certain. When I come to, an oxygen mask covers my face and two people load me onto a stretcher.
I’ve never believed in guardian angels before.
I still don’t.
Who needs one of those when I have Delphine?
She climbs into the back of the ambulance. Sliding her hand in mine, she reserves the lecture I know is brewing in that merciful, crinkled gaze of hers. And instead she gives me nothing but her support, her calming presence, and an unspoken reminder that we don’t always have to do things alone.
EPILOGUE
LYDIA
Two Weeks Later
“Feel like a walk?” Delphine raps on my bedroom door on this lazy Sunday afternoon. Part of my recuperation requires an abundance of fresh air to keep my body oxygenated and my lungs functioning. The doctors say I’ll make a full recovery. The smoke inhalation was minor, and they promise that someday soon my lungs won’t burn every time I take a breath.
I flip the covers off my legs. “Yeah.”
She doesn’t offer to help me out of bed. I’m not helpless. Not anymore. The first couple of days home, I let her dote on me, but it was mostly for her benefit. Delphine is a caretaker. She needs to be needed. And because she literally saved my life, I wanted to at least give her that.
She waits for me by the door, placing my slip-on shoes side by side because she can’t help herself. And then she grabs two waters from the fridge. A minute later, we’re ambling down the semicrowded sidewalks of Bent Creek, passing families on spring break and locals out for a Sunday stroll.
“Detective Rhinehart called this morning,” I say.
“Yeah? Any updates?”
“They’re still waiting to hear back from the lab, but he wanted to tell me about the reward money . . . there’s almost seventy grand in there, and he says it’s all mine once they can confirm everything.”
“That’s wonderful, angel.”
I’ve been thinking lately about timing—or divine intervention, as Delphine likes to call it. The night I ordered a ride using Delphine’s phone, she woke in the middle of the night after a fiery nightmare, parched, something that rarely happens to her. Half-asleep, she shuffled out to the kitchen to grab a drink . . . which was when she spotted the notification on her phone from the rideshare app. Within minutes, she pieced it all together, raced to her car, and programmed the coordinates into her navigation app.
She was an hour behind me.
But looking back, even a minute could’ve been the difference between life and death.
She was barreling down the highway, about to turn on their road when she spotted the BMW blazing past in a trail of gravel dust—which was the same moment she noticed the flame-engulfed house up ahead.
Flooring the gas pedal, she called 911, and against the operator’s advice, she ran into the burning farmhouse . . . where she found me slumped over, three steps from the bottom landing.
“I talked to the detective from Willow Branch earlier,” I say, inhaling a lungful of salty air as I shove my hands in my pockets. “He said they found part of the knife in the fireplace.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“But,” I say with a sigh, “the fire destroyed any DNA evidence there could’ve been on it . . .”