Run Away With Me : A fast-paced psychological thriller by Daniel Hurst (ebook reader ink txt) 📕

I think about how strange it was that it ended up under the bed as the lights go out and I feel Adam crawling under the duvet beside me, but I soon stop worrying about that when I feel his arm go around my waist. I have always loved lying like this with him, so I take a moment to enjoy it before he removes his arm and rolls over to go to sleep. But then, with the darkness and silence restored to the cottage, I have time to think about the dream that I just had. But I know it wasn’t just a dream. It was something more than that.

It almost felt like a vision.

A glimpse into the future.

I’ve had things like that before, though not for a few years. They’re not just dreams, they’re not just nightmares, and they’re not always what I would call flashes of my future, but they are something that I’ve never been able to properly explain. All I know is that there have been times in my life when I have seen things in my sleep that have later come true. Like the time in my twenties when I had the most amazing dream in which I was living a carefree, almost euphoric existence in some kind of exotic land. It was only a year later during my backpacking adventures in Asia when I recognised the beach resort I was staying at as the one I had seen in my dream. I actually cried when I realised it because not only was I there in real life, but I was feeling as carefree and euphoric as I had when the dream had come to me a year earlier. I also had experiences of dreaming about being a mum long before I got pregnant and while that might not seem particularly clairvoyant, the fact that a doctor had once told my mother that I might struggle to achieve pregnancy after a childhood accident meant it was significant for me. Yet again, that dream came true in the end.

But what about this latest dream? The one in which I’m standing in my home, and I don’t recognise it. The one in which Adam is laughing at me while standing with another woman and a baby that I felt was Samuel but may not have been. Surely that can’t have been a vision of my future. Surely that was just some weird nightmare made up of an amalgamation of some of my worst fears, caused by the amount of stress I am currently under as I go through the late stages of pregnancy while being on the run with my drink-driving husband.

At least I hope that’s the case.

Heaven forbid that dream comes true like the others.

21

ADAM

It’s a new day, and I’m feeling relatively refreshed, although not as much as I would have been if Laura hadn’t woken up in the night and made me turn the lights on. In the end though, I was fortunate to get away with what I had been doing so I can’t feel too aggrieved to have gone through that little dramatic episode.

She could have caught me with her phone, and then I would have had some explaining to do.

I’d waited for Laura to fall asleep last night before I’d crept out of the bed and picked up her mobile from her bedside table. Then I’d taken it into the bathroom where I’d done what I needed to do before making my way back, where the plan was to return the phone to the table and get back into bed. Unfortunately, I came back to my wife already aware that her phone was missing.

Thankfully, the bedroom had been too dark for her to notice it in my hand when I re-entered the bedroom and I managed to conceal it by tucking it into the waistband of my boxer shorts underneath my t-shirt before I turned the light on. Then I had to pretend to be looking for the phone around the bed with her until I was able to discreetly remove the phone from on my person and put it on the carpet by the bed. Five seconds later and I miraculously found it. Laura seemed to buy it, and we went back to sleep shortly after.

Disaster averted.

Now I’m preparing for the next part of my plan, and I hope this goes a little more smoothly. I will tell Laura that I’m going to make another trip into the village to check the newspapers, but I have a feeling she isn’t going to be quite so willing to let me go by myself as she was last time. She is going to want to come with me.

I need to find a way to persuade her that she shouldn’t.

The best method of doing this is to tell her that if the police are looking for me, one guy on a crowded high street wearing a baseball cap isn’t particularly memorable to anybody. But that one guy with a heavily pregnant woman might be, and that may be all the police need to know when it comes to a witness making a statement. I’ll convince Laura that there is much less of a chance of me being recognised and remembered if I go alone, as opposed to with her. It’s not a perfect reason for her to stay, but I’ll sell her on it because I have to. My entire plan depends on her staying here and not going into the village.

But then I walk back into the bedroom after my morning shower, and I see that I might not need to make up any excuses about why my wife should stay behind after all. That’s because I get a glimpse of her on the bed and I realise she won’t be going anywhere today.

She looks terrible.

‘Are you okay?’ I