Page 35 of My Husband’s Wife

Thirty-Four

Madison gently lifts Emily up even though she knows it might wake her but she has to get out of the house. After popping the ring in her pocket, she hurries out through the back door, and heads to the cabin.

‘It’s booked. We’re now getting married on the tenth of May.’ He gets up out of his office chair and comes over.

He fails to see the frown lines on her forehead as he brushes one of her red curls from the corner of her mouth.

‘Theo, I think someone has been in our house.’

He furrows his brows. ‘When?’ He runs to the door and she follows.

‘I don’t know. I was feeding Emily in the lounge and I saw someone outside.

’ She doesn’t tell him that it was only a fleeting something out of the corner of her eye, that in the absence of a car it may have even been a bird.

She’s so sure that it was a person and that they left the ring in their kitchen. ‘The door was on the latch.’

‘Damn, I must have left it like that earlier when I went to the car.’

As they trudge through the house, she goes to tell him about the ring but he’s already outside, using the torch on his phone to check out the bushes with Buster excitedly following.

Several minutes later, they’re back and he locks the door.

He runs upstairs and she hears him going through each room before he runs back down.

Then he heads into the other two rooms, the one that contains his gym equipment and the large room that has become a dumping station for all Emily’s things.

‘Nothing. Are you sure you saw someone?’

She pulls the ring out of her pocket. ‘They must have left this.’

He takes it from her and holds it up to the light. ‘Love you forever,’ he mutters as he reads the inscription. ‘Where did you find that?’

‘In the fruit bowl.’

He runs his fingers through his hair again, the ring still in one hand. He’s been doing that a lot lately. ‘No one has been here. I found it in the garden the other day. It must have been there for years.’

He never mentioned finding a ring. And when did he put it in the fruit bowl? She’d been in the kitchen earlier and it wasn’t there. She rubs her eyes and yawns. ‘But you’ve been here years.’

‘Well longer than me.’

‘It wasn’t here earlier.’

‘It was. Maybe you didn’t notice it.’ His Adam’s apple bobs up and down as he swallows.

‘Theo, what aren’t you telling me?’

He’s going blotchy, the way he does when he gets anxious. She has a feeling he’s lying but she doesn’t know why. If she hazarded a guess, it would be that he had no idea that ring was in the fruit bowl until the moment she showed it to him.