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

It took me longer than it should have to stop it. Once is bad enough, but three months is a long time to be seeing somebody who isn’t my husband. I guess it made me feel good. It reminded me of my youth. It reminded me that there used to be more fun things in life than just commuting, working and saving money for a rainy day. Most of all, it reminded me that I was alive.

But I eventually put a stop to it. I told Bradley enough was enough one day in the kitchen at work, and he agreed, though this time we both actually meant it. Fortunately, he got a new job across the city only a couple of months after that, so I didn’t have be around him for forty hours a week, and now I haven’t seen him in months.

Until today.

The sight of his face has brought up all manner of emotions inside me, but the prevailing one is shock. The fact that he is missing is scary because as much as what we did together was wrong, and as much as I never wanted to see him again, I still hope nothing bad has happened to him. But it must have. People just don’t go missing for good reasons. He must have come to some harm.

Unless he has been having another affair and this time he has left Holly.

But even if he was seeing someone else like he had done with me, he wouldn’t just vanish. He has a job. He has commitments. He has a wife to divorce.

So that leads me to think that something bad has happened to him.

I rest my hands on my stomach and almost right on cue, Samuel delivers a swift kick to my insides, causing me to gasp slightly in pain. The little boy wants to get out. He knows it’s time. But I don’t want him to come yet. It isn’t safe for him out here. There’s too much uncertainty in the world.

I want to know what happened to Bradley. I want to know if Adam is being honest with me about the TV. And I want to know if I am going to be a good mother.

One thing is for certain: I’m not a good wife.

I know that because the father of the baby inside me right now is not the man I married.

It’s the man I cheated on him with.

36

LAURA

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

Today is the day I tell Adam that I am pregnant. It should be exciting. It should be magical. It should be one of the happiest days of our entire lives. But it’s none of those things, at least not for me. That’s because I know that Adam isn’t the father.

That means everything I do from this point on is just pretending.

I’ve known about the baby growing inside me for two weeks. That was when I was late, and when I got a test. It’s also how I know that Bradley is the father. He was the only man I slept with in the whole month before that missed period.

I panicked when I saw the positive result. I thought my marriage was over. I thought I’d ruined everything. But then I had an idea. I didn’t have to tell Adam about the baby just yet, and I didn’t have to tell Bradley about it at all. There was a way to keep my marriage intact and not ruin lives. All I had to do was be careful.

The day I found out I was pregnant sent me into a tailspin, but it was only the next day when I regained my composure and charted a path out of this mess. I went home from work that night, and I made love to Adam. Because it was our first time in a month, it wasn’t the easiest thing to make happen. There were two reasons for the dry spell. One, I‘d been sleeping with somebody else. I can’t blame my husband for that one. But two, Adam had been different lately. He was always tired, always grumpy and quite often coming up to bed stinking of booze. He put it down to being stressed at work and told me he was going to quit and get a better job, and I agreed it was for the best. But this period was hardly a recipe for physical intimacy between us.

But I managed to get our sex life back on track that night and while it wasn’t great, I did what I needed to do. I created the opportunity for me to tell Adam that I was pregnant a few weeks later and make him have no reason not to believe that he was the father.

Now I am just waiting for him to come home and I will give him the news. He knows nothing of my affair so he will have no reason to think the baby is anybody else’s, and he has no idea that I am almost a full month into my term. I will tell him that I only recently missed my period and got a test, rather than admitting it happened a fortnight ago before we made love. What that means is that I will need to lie about the baby’s due date with him.

I’ll need to tell him that it is slightly later than it really is. Hopefully, the baby won’t come early. If it arrives after exactly nine months, Adam will just think it is early, and if it comes late then it will actually be right at the time when Adam believes it should be.

I will tell Adam my due date is 14th November, but really it is 24th October. The morning sickness hasn’t started yet, so that’s good, and I’m hoping it doesn’t at all, but even if it does then I won’t have to try and hide it now anyway. Adam is going to