Chapter 2 — YOU DON'T BELONG HERE

The upstairs landing at Wren House runs along three sides of a two-storey entrance hall.

There is a chandelier hanging in the middle of that void, on a chain, from a plaster medallion.

The balustrade is painted a pale blue-grey that Margot had specified from a fan deck in 2011 and had had redone twice because the painters got it wrong.

It comes to about here on me.

I am five foot four.

I want to describe what happened in the order it happened, because I have now given this account eleven times — to a paramedic, to two patrol officers, to a detective, to two lawyers, to a grand jury, to a judge, to my own mother, and twice to a woman in a small room whose whole job is to sit with people while they say the same eight sentences over and over until they stop shaking.

I came out of the guest room with the suitcase in my right hand and my handbag on my left shoulder.

Margot came out behind me.

Roz was standing at the far end of the landing with the towels still in her arms, and she had not moved, and she did not move for the next four seconds, and she has apologised to me for that maybe fifty times and I have told her fifty times that four seconds is not a length of time in which a twenty-six-year-old is required to do anything.

Margot said my name.

I turned around.

That is the part I have gone over the most.

I turned around, and turning around put my back to the rail.

She was very close.

She put one hand on my shoulder — the left one, the one with the handbag strap on it — and her face was about eight inches from mine, and she said it quietly, almost kindly, the way you would tell someone their reservation had been cancelled.

"You don't belong here."

Then she pushed.

It was not a shove in the chest.

I want to be precise, because the defence spent a good deal of money on the difference. It was a hand on the shoulder and a step forward. Her weight, not her arm.

My hip hit the rail.

And a woman who is eight months pregnant has no top half.

That is the thing nobody who has not been pregnant understands about the physics of it. Your centre of gravity is out in front of you and about eight inches lower than it used to be, and once the rail is behind your hip there is nothing left holding you upright but hope.

The suitcase went first, out of my hand.

I remember the chandelier.

I remember it very clearly, going past me and then being above me, and how strange it was that it was lit at four thirty in the afternoon.

I do not remember hitting the floor.

They tell me the fall is fourteen feet, three inches, from the top of the rail to the marble, and that I turned in the air, and that I landed on my left side and my left forearm, which is why my left wrist has a plate in it and my daughter has a perfectly ordinary skull.

I remember the marble being cold on my cheek.

I remember hair across my face and not being able to move my arm to get it off.

And I remember, from a long way above me, Margot Halloway's voice saying, in an ordinary tone, as if she had dropped a plate:

"She fell."

Then, closer, on the stairs, coming down fast:

"Don't."

That was Emmett.

I did not know that then. I had known Emmett Cole for two years and I could not have told you the sound of him running.

He came down that staircase and across the foyer and he did not touch me for the first two seconds — he crouched and he looked and he said, "Elise. Don't move your neck. Look at me. Don't move your neck."

And then he got one arm behind my shoulders and lifted my head and chest off the stone about four inches, and held it, and stayed there.

I got my hand into the front of his jacket.

I said, "She pushed me."

And Emmett Cole, who had worked for that family for twenty-six years, who had driven Margot Halloway to the airport four hundred times, who called her ma'am at seven in the morning and ma'am at midnight, looked up over my head at the woman standing at the top of the stairs.

He already had his phone in his other hand.

He said, "Call the police."

Then he said, into the phone, without waiting: "There's a woman thirty-four weeks pregnant fallen fourteen feet onto stone at Wren House, Ashgrove. She's conscious. She's talking. She was pushed."