‘All good. Please don’t worry.’
‘And you’re happy with the money?’
He’s been generous with his offer. It shows how desperate he is because I know for sure carers don’t get paid twenty pounds an hour. Not outside London, anyway. ‘Sure.’
He continues. ‘While Hattie’s sleeping, take a break. You won’t hear a peep from her for a couple of hours.’ He pats his pockets. ‘Now, where are my keys? I must get going. I have to pack.’
He’s smooth-talking, for sure, but not offensive. Not creepy in the way I expected. It does make me question my thoughts as he leaves the house. I watch him walk across the grounds to his office. Have I made a grave mistake by coming here?
I head to my room, relieved to be taking a break. A headache is brewing behind my eye. It must be the heat. I close the door, wishing it had a lock. I go to my rucksack to find my small medical pouch where I keep a strip of paracetamol and a few plasters for times like this. I pop a couple of tablets then head to the ensuite. A nice cold shower is what I need.
After the shower, as I come back into the bedroom, wrapped in a towel, I go to get some cream out of my rucksack and stop. The back of my neck goes cold. I have a routine when I’m travelling. A ritual that came about when I had to make a quick exit from a hostel when I went backpacking the summer before I started uni. A girl had become friendly. Too friendly. I didn’t like the way she followed me around. I always zip up my rucksack with the zips meeting on the left. But they are now meeting on the right. I unzip it and rifle through the contents. Nothing appears to be missing. Perhaps I’m mistaken. I reach for the left side pocket and unzip it. I gasp. I always keep my keys in the left pocket and my phone in the right to avoid damaging the screen. There’s no mistaking it: my rucksack has been tampered with. My keys are now in the right pocket.
It appears they’ve been in here, going through my stuff.
They are on to me.
34
BETH
‘Stop fussing!’ I scream across the roof of Justin’s Porsche. I want to throw my bag at him.
‘You need to worry about that girl, not me. Something’s off.’
I open the car door and climb inside, throwing my bag in the footwell before I can launch it at him.
Justin gets in and fastens his seat belt. His jaw tightens, as do his hands around the steering wheel. He puffs out a long, low breath. I’m getting on his nerves, and I know he’s not listening to me. He rarely does. He used to. But that was before.
Before everything changed between us.
He starts the engine, ignoring my outburst. The way he ignores a lot of what he calls my hysterical behaviour, which has become more prevalent in recent months. He reverses the car and pulls out of the driveway, throwing up a shower of gravel and baked mud in its wake. ‘Let’s talk about nice stuff. What about our wedding anniversary? It’s only a month away,’ he says. ‘What do you want to do? We could go away.’
I turn and face the window, taking in the vivid blue sky and passing greenery. How I hate this car. The seats are too close to the ground, and I end up feeling nauseous most journeys. I feel every pothole, every blister in the road’s surface, where the tarmac has buckled under the heat. Don’t get me wrong, I understand its appeal. It’s a gorgeous-looking car. And when I was younger, I’d have enjoyed being thrown around the country lanes. But not now. With my hypersensitive body, it’s far too uncomfortable. Justin drives far too fast, as well, and not in a controlled way. He’s erratic, reacting rather than reading the road. But other than an Uber, or driving this car, I have no way of getting around. Not since the accident. I haven’t replaced the car. I doubt I ever will. The thought of getting behind the wheel again scares me too much. How I’ve changed. I was once so strong.
Justin puts his hand on my knee and squeezes it. ‘Twenty years, Beth. That’s cause for a big celebration.’
‘It’s weeks away.’ Planning ahead with enthusiasm becomes too emotionally difficult when living with a disease that could be terminal. Life knocks you sideways. And on some days, it’s too damn difficult to get back up.
He squeezes my knee again. ‘Less than a month. Where do you want to go?’ His voice is steady. It always is, even when the world around him is falling to pieces.
I open the glove compartment to find my sunglasses. How I used to love the sun – loved nothing more than lying on a sunbed by a pool with a good book. But when you hear the ‘C’ word, all the things you enjoy become a threat to your survival. It’s like sitting on a time bomb, not knowing when it’s going to explode.
‘You name it. I’ll book it. We could go back to Scotland. Without me working this time, of course.’
I think back to the night we met. He sought me out across the uni theatre. He’d been called in last minute to replace the lead who’d gone down with chickenpox. Even back then he knew how to work his magic on the vulnerable. During that long rehearsal, he pursued me. By the time it finished, he’d invited me for a drink that turned into two, then three and four. By the end of the night, he had me in his bed, teaching me things I’d never imagined possible.
I thought it would be a one-night stand and was shocked when he told me he was taking me for a drink after the following day’s rehearsal. A bond formed between us. By the second week I was in love. We became inseparable over the following fortnight. I then saw it as a month-long fling. After all, how could someone like that want me? After the final curtain, I thought I’d never see him again. I’d resigned myself to the thought that our paths would only cross again by accident. How wrong could I have been? A year later, as he repositioned my graduation cap that had dropped lopsided on my head, he asked me to marry him. Two months later, I was walking down the aisle.
The first three years were bliss as he grew his counselling business, and I climbed the corporate ladder in the marketing department of a FTSE 100 company with a significant health and well-being portfolio that afforded us countless holidays in five-star hotels, sipping cocktails in places I’d only ever seen in magazines.
But it didn’t last.
He decided to supplement his counselling qualification with a diploma in hypnotherapy. He used me as his guinea pig. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
That’s when it all began to go wrong.
I’d leave him if I could.
