Pip stood up and she wasn’t sure what to do. She wanted to hug them close to her and cry, but she couldn’t because then she’d have to tell them, tell them the terrible thing she’d done. But how could she leave, how could she say goodbye without that? Maybe just one, maybe just Josh.
She caught him as he climbed down from his chair, wrapping him in a quick hug, disguised as a wrestle, carrying him through and chucking him on to the sofa.
‘Get off me,’ he giggled, kicking out at her.
Pip grabbed her jacket, forcing herself to walk away from them, otherwise she might just never go. She headed towards the front door. Was this the last time she’d ever walk through it? Would she be a woman in her forties, her fifties, the next time she was here? The lines on her face all from that one night, etched into her forever. Or would she never come home again?
‘Bye,’ she called, her voice catching in her throat, a black hole in her chest that might never go away.
‘Where are you off to?’ Her mum poked her head out of the kitchen. ‘A podcast thing?’
‘Yeah,’ Pip shrugged, sliding her feet into her shoes, not looking back at her mum because it hurt too much.
She dragged herself towards the door. Don’t look back, don’t look back. She opened it.
‘I love you all,’ she shouted, loud, louder than she meant to because it covered the cracks in her voice. She shut the door behind her, the slam cutting her off, severing her from them. Just in time too, because she was crying now, heaving sobs that made it hard to breathe as she unlocked her car and sat inside.
She bawled into her hands. For a count of three. Just a count of three. And then she had to go. To Ravi. She was broken now, but this next goodbye would shatter her.
She started the car and she drove, thinking of all the people she couldn’t say goodbye to: Cara, Nat, the Reynolds brothers, Naomi. But they’d understand, they’d understand why she couldn’t.
Pip drove down the high street, veering off the road down Gravelly Way, towards Ravi. Towards the goodbye she’d never wanted to make. She pulled in outside the Singhs’ house, remembering that na?ve girl who’d knocked on this door so long ago, introducing herself by telling Ravi she didn’t think his brother was a killer. So different from the person standing here now, and yet they’d always share one thing: Ravi. He was her best thing, this girl and the one before.
But something was wrong, Pip could tell already. There were no cars in the drive. Not Ravi’s, not his parents’ cars. She knocked anyway. Putting her ear to the glass to listen. Nothing. She knocked again, and again, ramming her fist against the wood until it hurt, invisible blood dripping from her knuckles.
She held open the letterbox and called his name. Reaching for him, in every corner and crack. He wasn’t here. She’d told him she was coming; why wasn’t he here?
Had that been it, on the phone? No last goodbye, face to face, eye to eye? No tucking her face into that place where his neck met his shoulder, her home. No holding on to him and refusing to let go, to disappear.
Pip needed that. She needed that moment to keep her going. But maybe Ravi didn’t. He was angry at her. And the last she would hear of him before all their conversations were from a pre-paid prison phone was that strange ‘OK,’ and the final click as he’d let her go. Ravi was ready, and so she had to be too.
It couldn’t wait. She had to tell Hawkins tonight, now, before they dug too far and found any link to those who had helped Pip that night. A confession was how she saved them from her, how she saved Ravi, even if he hated her for it.
‘Bye,’ Pip said to the empty house, leaving it behind her, her chest shuddering as she climbed back into her car. Peeling away, both the car and her.
She turned down the A-road, leaving Little Kilton behind her in the rear-view mirror, and part of her wanted to go back and stay there forever with her people, the ones she could count on her fingers, and the other part wanted to burn it down behind her. Watch it die in flames.
She felt numb inside now and she thanked that black hole in her chest for taking the pain too, letting the numbness spread as she drove towards Amersham, towards the police station and the bad, bad place. She was just this journey, she didn’t think about what came after, she was just this car and these two yellow headlights, carving up the night.
Pip followed the fast road under the tunnel and round the corner, dark trees pressing in around her. Headlights were coming towards her, on the other side of the road, passing by with a small shush. There was another set, down the road, but something was wrong. They were flashing quickly at her, flickering in her eyes so the world disappeared in between. The car was getting closer, closer. A horn pressed in a three-part pattern: Long-short-long.