Page 41 of My Husband’s Wife

Forty

Madison jolts up in the bath to the sound of a car engine pulling up outside the front of the house.

It’s one in the morning and rain patters against the rattling windowpane.

Shivering, she steps out of the freezing cold water and grabs a towel to wrap around herself.

She’d been asleep for over an hour. Buster interrupts the silence by barking at the front door.

She stands on the landing, dripping water on the carpet while listening out for a knock at the door, but a few seconds later, Theo calls out as he comes through the back door.

After checking on Emily and putting her bathrobe on, she creeps downstairs to find Theo sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea.

‘I heard the car pulling up. Did you go out?’

He furrows his brows. ‘No, I’ve just finished up in the cabin. I didn’t hear a car.’

Maybe she’d been half asleep. She’d been having this disturbing dream about Emily crawling across a flame-filled landing, then a crazy drunken woman who failed to save her when she could have.

The woman in her dream couldn’t have been Theo’s mother; she was too young.

It was the woman who came with Zach to see Theo, the free spirit with the brown curls and the pink wellies.

‘How did tonight go? Did you film the badgers?’

He shakes his head. ‘I gave up in the end and left the wildlife cams running from the den. I went back to the cabin instead and worked on the McKinley job and built a PC for another client. Have you just got out of the bath? I thought you’d have been in bed.’

‘I fell asleep and woke up freezing cold.’ She pauses, wondering how to ask about Zach. ‘I was thinking, do you remember a couple that came here before Christmas? They wanted to talk to you about their new business and their computer system?’

‘Er, can you be more specific?’

‘Woman with really long brown, curly hair with a little boy. She was with a man who had dark hair. We don’t get many people bringing their kids along. The little boy asked for the Wi-Fi code so he could play a game on his mum’s phone.’

He closes his eyes for a few seconds then clicks his fingers. ‘Yes, they didn’t go for my quote so I didn’t do their job. What’s this about?’

‘Can you remember anything about them?’

‘I don’t know them, so why would I?’

She waves a dismissive hand and pours a glass of water. ‘I think I’m just having weird dreams. It’s nothing. I thought I saw him the other day.’ She didn’t see him the other day, but she needed an excuse to bring him up.

‘Where?’

Now she has his attention but she doesn’t know why. ‘At the grocers by the salon. I said hello but he ignored me. He obviously couldn’t remember me so it’s nothing really. Are you ready for bed?’

‘I think I’ll just wind down a bit. You go up. I’ll be there soon.’ He stands and kisses her. ‘I’ll check on Emily when I come up. I saw that you left some milk in the fridge, so I can feed her again if she’s hungry.’

As she goes to leave, she spots Theo’s trainers at the back door and they look saturated and mucky.

He was wearing his walking boots when he left for the cabin, so why were his trainers there?

It was him pulling up in the car. She hadn’t imagined it.

But where had he been at this time of the night, and worse, why was he lying – again?