He Gave Our Helicopter Away, So I Stopped Waiting to Be Rescued novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Room That Stood

I went to the villa alone, because I asked to.

Fraser stood at the foot of the causeway, where the tide had drawn back and left a wet black road across the strait.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "Then I'm coming up that hill, whatever you say."

"Thirty."

"Twenty-five."

"Done."

He kissed my knuckles, hard, and let go.

I walked the causeway with my phone in my hand and the villa's alarm panel in my head.

I had drawn that panel myself, a flat white box beside the stairs with a red button under a cover.

It rang at the station and in the security office, and nowhere else.

The house stood on the rise exactly as I'd left it, with the sea gone down around it.

The south lawn was a mess of black mud and torn palms.

The ground-floor windows had been blown out and the surge had come through the living room and left a line of salt on the walls at knee height.

Upstairs, the reinforced room still had its light on.

The front door was unlocked.

I stood in the wrecked hall for a minute with my hand flat on the wall.

I had designed every line of that house for the old storm, and the room above me had stood anyway.

I climbed the stairs.

Corinna sat in the nursery.

She had pulled the glider chair to the middle of the floor and sat in it with her ankles crossed, in her dove-grey dress.

The cot stood against the wall, white and empty.

On the changing table lay a stack of folders, my folders, from my study.

"Hello, Lena," she said. "I always liked this room."

"Get out of my daughter's chair."

"It's a lovely chair. You had very good taste."

She did not get up.

"I came to talk," she said. "Sit down. I'll make it short."

"I'll stand."

"Suit yourself." She looked around the nursery. "You know what I wanted? I'd like to say it was the money. It wasn't the money. I wanted to be the one this house was built for."

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