I have failed and what will he do to me this time? He stops and opens the door that I scrub for him each morning and we go inside his cottage. The pain is something I live with every day of my life, but not like this. The nerves and bones and tendons and muscles are as one damaged bundle sharp flints and old meat. I can feel his forearm at the back of my knees and he’s holding it there as gently as a concert violinist might hold a bow. He needs no violence at this moment because he controls everything the eye can see. He walks without speaking, his strong shoulder pressing into my waist, hard and plateaued. My tears fall to the mud, to the footprints I created an hour ago, the man’s size eleven sandal prints one straight, the other a right angle-that one a pathetic scrape more than a print, each step a victory and an escape and a complete failure. He bends and reaches out and gently picks me up off the dirt and he lifts me higher to his shoulder and carries me on toward the cottage. I’ve made it past the locked halfway gate. I think of you, Kim-Ly, with Mother’s eyes and Father’s lips and your own nose. And I will endure them for you and you alone. My sister, my little sister, it is you who gives me the strength to breathe right now on this long, straight-churned mud track in this unseen flatland. It’s Kim-Ly in my head now and I will not let him in. With a clean, clear-thinking head maybe I’d have managed to escape? Not with this leg. I fold forward with a crack, a sharp stone beneath my right knee, a blessed distraction from my ankle. I look right at the nothingness, the endless fields he’s sculpted, and the spires in the distance, and then left to the wind turbines and the nothingness there, and then back. He turns onto this track, his track, the track to his farm, to his land. Keep driving, for the love of God be someone else and keep on driving. I look right, toward the town past the bridge, and left, toward the village.
Is that his truck? Maybe it’s just the same model. I stand completely still, my anklebone throbbing stronger than my own heart, and he is there on the horizon. The clouds are moving over me, urging me out of this forgotten place, helping me at my back, pushing me along toward that road, toward that one bus per day with his banknote hidden in my hair. I can spot his Land Rover from a mile away. I move as fast as I can, my teeth biting down onto my tongue. The track is pale October brown, the mud churned and dried and churned by the tractor. Etched aches and new pains melt into red-hot misery beneath my right knee: boiling fat and razor-sharp icicles all at once. The creased green paper’s rolled and tucked into my hair, still black after these nine long years though only God knows how.Įvery step is a mile. I have my fiver, his fiver, my ticket out of this flatland hell. Trucks transporting cabbages and sugar beets cars ferrying fruit pickers.
My eyes scan the distant road, left, then right, for him. I walk and hobble and it’s still a whole world of pain away from where I am right now. The destination is there, I can see it, but it’s not getting any closer. My right ankle is the size of a fist and I can feel bone shards scraping together, six-year-old shards, as I limp away from the farm cottage toward the distant road. This harrowing journey is one worth taking” ( Publishers Weekly). Intense, dark, and utterly gripping The Last Thing to Burn “explores the resilience of the human spirit, even in the face of unfathomable evil. Can she save herself, her child, and this innocent woman at the same time? Or is she doomed to spend the remainder of her life as a captive? But when another woman is brought into the fold on the farm, her plans go awry. When she discovers she is pregnant, she resolves to protect her child, no matter the cost, and starts to meticulously plot her escape. On an isolated farm in the United Kingdom, a woman is trapped by the monster who kidnapped her seven years ago. “Brilliantly written.terrifying.”-Ruth Ware, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One by OneĪ woman being held captive is willing to risk everything to save herself, her unborn child, and her captor’s latest victim in this “intense, dark, and utterly chilling” (Jennifer Hillier, author of Jar of Hearts) thriller in the tradition of Misery and Room. “Immediate, intense, gripping, taut, terrifying, moving, and brilliant.” -Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Girl
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