Queen Never Cry novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: The Stairs

Lydia hit the black-and-white floor with a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.

Someone screamed.

Someone dropped a tray, and glass burst across the tiles.

She lay at the foot of the stairs on her side, one arm bent under her, her gold dress hiked above her knees.

Her eyes were shut.

"She pushed her!" Desmond roared.

He crossed the foyer and dropped to his knees beside his wife.

"Everyone saw it! Call the police! That woman pushed my wife down the stairs!"

Sixty heads swung up to me.

I stood at the top of the staircase with my hands open and empty at my sides.

I had not moved.

My heart was pounding, but my mind had gone cold and clear, the way it had in a hundred bad hours at Dwight.

I walked down.

I did it slowly, one step at a time, so that anyone who wished could film every inch of it.

At the bottom I knelt on the other side of Lydia.

"Don't touch her," Desmond snapped.

"Don't move her neck." I laid two fingers against Lydia's throat. "Her pulse is strong. Somebody get an ambulance."

"I've called one," said a mother near the door.

Desmond stared at me.

He had expected me to run.

He had expected a crowd with its mouth open, and a woman fleeing a house in disgrace.

Instead I was taking a pulse.

"She was right there!" he told the room, louder now. "Alone with my wife, at the top of the stairs!"

"Alone?" said a man's voice.

He was a heavy father in a sweater, holding up his phone.

"I was filming Posy's cake. I turned around when the girl yelled."

"I've got it, I think, from the door."

He walked forward, thumbed the screen, and held it out so the people near him could see.

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