So he remembered. “Why didn’t you do something?”
“I did. He was so strong. But you kept saying sideways, and I thought, when my parents took me to the Isle of Palms when I was little, my dad said if you get caught in a rip current, you don’t try to swim inshore, you swim sideways till the current lets go. He wanted to push you down the stairs, but I made him think the bathtub was better.”
“Thank you so much, I was really looking forward to drowning.”
“It was a little more time. I didn’t mean those things I said; it was all for more time. I kept looking for sideways, like you said. There had to be a way. I listened to you all the time, Lacey, I did. All the time. Then when he was fighting Lex, there it was, a way to get us both down the stairs, away from you. I pushed, and we fell.”
“You could have died,” Lacey said. They reached the top of the ramp, where Harry was waiting, smiling between the cabbages.
“I didn’t care. Somebody had to die. As long as it wasn’t you.”
Harry opened the door for them with a flourish. Eric put his hands on the wheels and stopped Ella Dane from pushing him inside. He looked at Lacey. “Is it safe now?” he said. “Are we going to be able to live here?”
“Look,” Lacey said. The afternoon light spilled through the porthole window and pooled brightly at the foot of the stairs, as it always did, and the house stood empty, remembering nothing.