Page 99 of No Safe Place

Sunday | Evening

Callum

For the first time, Ruby looked unsure.

They were sat at opposite ends of the dining table, Callum at the far end, away from the doors and the stairs up to Lily. She hadn’t cable-tied his hands. He just had to keep her calm, and make her think he wasn’t a threat.

Ruby’s grip on the knife was so hard, her knuckles were turning white.

It’d probably only been ten minutes, since he found Ruby in the kitchen. He couldn’t check, because his pathological fucking fear of clocks meant there were none in the house. But moving the fridge, Lily being led upstairs, the front door – it felt like time had slowed down for all of it.

‘I watched you, you know. At the hospital, when I came to visit Paige with mum. I’d see you all. You never gave me a second glance.’

Callum felt drained, and he didn’t speak, didn’t want to make it worse.

‘Paige talked about you, Callum.’ Ruby’s voice had dropped an octave, and she didn’t look up at Callum as she spoke.

‘She did?’

Ruby nodded. Wiped a tear from her eye, smearing eyeliner across one cheek. ‘She was in awe of you.’

His heart swelled a little, and he closed his eyes. ‘She was the strongest of all of us. By the time we got to that ward, we were all broken. Completely shattered. And it didn’t matter, what she was going through, how much she was hurting – she was always there. Always.’

Ruby sniffed. ‘It was scary. Watching her get sicker and sicker. When I was ten, she used to wake me up in the night and make me get up and – and she’d make me shower. Downstairs, so Mum and Dad wouldn’t hear.’

‘She told us about that,’ Callum said, quietly. ‘She always regretted the impact it had on you, her OCD.’

‘She did?’ Ruby turned to him, her eyes wide.

‘She talked about you a lot.’ He kept his voice light, but he didn’t want to hear about Paige’s OCD from Ruby’s point of view.

Callum couldn’t sit opposite the girl who had killed David and Sam, and feel sorry for her. Poor Ruby, how hard for her .

‘I can’t imagine how you felt when she died,’ he offered. ‘But you should know, she was like a sister to me.’

Callum jumped – Ruby had leapt to her feet and knocked her chair over.

‘She wasn’t a sister to you, or you’d – you would have stopped it —’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘She was my sister. I would have protected her.’

He leaned backwards in his chair, trying to put a few centimetres of extra space between them. ‘Protected her? From what?’