Page 17 of The Girlfriend’s Secret

‘I think that you do,’ Frederik says before departing, and the silence that follows is almost as uncomfortable as the conversation I had to have upstairs with Haven.

I get what my husband is trying to do. He wants me to take a break. Relax. Unwind. Hopefully emerge from this day a calmer, happier person. But it’s going to take more than a few hours by myself to feel any better about things. My worries about Haven aren’t just magically going to go away, nor are the consequences of Mum’s death.

In all the craziness and confusion of today, I’ve barely had time to think about the vast sum of money that my mother has left to me and my husband. It’s genuinely life-changing in so much that Frederik and I could take early retirement now and both of us could spend these next few years enjoying our fifties, rather than just surviving them as we eke our way closer to our pensions. I know it’s what my mother would have wanted. Why else would she leave so much to me? But what she would not have wanted is to see that there were cracks forming in her family. She would not have liked the signs that a domestic war was on the horizon. She certainly would have hated the idea that me and my son could fall out to the point where we might not speak anymore.

I fear that might be what is going to happen.

There appear to be only three ways that it won’t.

One, I come to realise Haven has genuinely good intentions and my worries are misplaced.

Two, Joel and Haven break up, and that seems unlikely considering how loved up they appear to be.

Or three, I decide to get rid of her myself.

As I sit here on my own and ponder all those possibilities, one of them seems more likely than the rest.

No prizes for guessing which one it is…

ELEVEN

LIANE

Another day begins with me coming downstairs to another mess. I already know it’s a mess that has Haven’s fingerprints all over it, not that I’ve hired any forensic experts to actually check the plates and glasses for those. I just know it was her because this is exactly like the mess that existed the other morning, so once again, she and Joel have come down here in the night and then gone back to bed leaving the place looking untidy.

At least I’m not alone this time. Frederik is still at home, and I better get used to that after the discussion we had last night in bed.

‘Send your manager an email and tell him that you won’t be coming back to work,’ I had urged him as we lay on our pillows with the lights low. ‘I’ve already done the same with mine.’

‘That’s a little hasty, don’t you think?’ Frederik had replied.

‘No, it’s not. You hate that job and now we have Mum’s money, you don’t need to do it anymore.’

‘We don’t have the money yet,’ he had reminded me.

‘But it’s coming.’

‘Yes, it is, but until it’s in our bank account, we still need to keep paying our mortgage and our bills, so I still need to go to work,’ Frederik had said rather sensibly.

But never one to be deterred easily, I had increased my efforts to show how much more fun his life could be if he stayed home with me rather than spend forty hours a week with his boss. It started by employing a few seduction techniques and rather than the two of us going to sleep at the same time we did every night, we tried something a little more fun. The kind of fun that we got up to a whole lot more in our younger days before real life quickly got in the way.

By the time we had finished, my husband’s attitude had changed somewhat. Maybe it was the endorphins or maybe he had just relaxed a little more. Either way, he said what I was hoping to hear.

‘Okay, I will quit my job,’ he declared triumphantly, prompting me to give him a big kiss on the cheek. ‘I’ll phone in sick tomorrow so we can go over the finer details of it together and then I’ll officially hand in my resignation next week. Hopefully the inheritance money will have been transferred to you by then too, so it’s not quite as stressful. Then we’ve still got the money from the house sale to come after that.’

‘Yes!’ I had cried, although not too loudly as to risk waking up Joel or Haven in the bedroom down the hallway. That was assuming they were asleep and not doing the very thing that we had just been doing in here. Hopefully not, because no mother likes to think of their son like that, although the shower surprise earlier had left me in no uncertain terms about how intimate the young couple in my home liked to be.

‘When do you think we will receive the money?’ Frederik had asked me. ‘Should it be by next week?’

‘Jane said it shouldn’t take long at all because my mother’s will was very clear,’ I had told him. ‘The only thing we have to consider is inheritance tax, but there’s not much we can do about that in this country.’

‘A small price to pay for living the rest of our lives in freedom,’ Frederik had decided, and I had to agree with him there, although it wouldn’t be such a small price when the tax bill came. With that, we turned off the lights, and I snuggled into his shoulder until the pair of us had fallen asleep.

But now it’s the morning and the warm glow of what occurred the previous evening has been well and truly replaced by the reality of a messy kitchen and the reminder that I am going to have to face Haven again very shortly.

Any hopes I might have had that her and my son would have enjoyed a long lie-in are dashed when I hear them coming down the stairs, and I prepare myself to put on a friendly face and welcome them into the kitchen for breakfast. But it quickly becomes clear that they aren’t hanging around to eat. Even more so when they start to put their coats on.

‘Morning,’ Frederik says as cheerfully as he can, but I’m not sure if it’s a genuine attempt at masking the awkwardness from yesterday or if he’s just really chipper from his coffee and phoning in sick to work today.