‘Are you going to move?’ I asked him.
‘You tell me.’
I peered hard at him, brandishing my phone. ‘If you move, I’m calling the police.’
‘OK.’
‘Don’t move.’
He used a finger to slowly draw an imaginary cross over his heart.
I glanced towards the en suite, nerves scattering across my shoulders and back.
There are two ways in and out, I reminded myself. If he comes through one way, you can leave by the other. You can still get out. There are no doors.
I checked on him once again, trying to gauge what exactly he was up to, and then I rushed forwards, threading my way along the right-hand side of the bed, darting through the gap beside the privacy wall.
The moment I stepped off the carpet onto the marbled bathroom tiles, I whipped my head to my left and took in everything in one breathless scan.
I’d polished the floor tiles earlier and they gleamed in the light.
I saw the walk-in shower and the wall-hung toilet and the freestanding copper bath and the double sinks.
I saw the window shutter that was closed for privacy at the end of the space and the white cotton towels on the towel rail and the dressing gowns hanging from the hooks on the wall.
Bethany wasn’t here.
It didn’t make sense.
I’d watched her come upstairs with Donovan. I’d heard them laugh and giggle and then I’d heard them walk along the landing towards the main bedroom together. I’d heard Bethany’s yelp followed by the thumps.
And how long afterwards had I come upstairs?
Not long.
A frantic swarming in my bloodstream. A heady confusion. My fingers began to twitch and curl.
There was something else.
Something out of sync, or misaligned in some way, that I couldn’t quite identify.
I stepped onto the bath mat in front of the shower cubicle and squinted.
Whatever I had noticed had been there and gone in the blink of an eye. It was something I was seeing or not seeing, or maybe it was nothing at all, but somehow it felt wrong and—
Get out.
A squirt of fear in my belly.
I turned around too quickly and he was right behind me – tall and broad, silent and looming – and I shrieked and jerked backwards just as the bath mat slipped from under me and then I was falling, my arms flinging upwards, my back arching backwards, the ceiling rotating above me and the floor tilting up to greet me until the back of my skull dashed off something solid yet hollow-sounding and my head was filled with a white-hot pulse of light.