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

Unless I do what Adam is suggesting.

Unless I run away with him.

‘What if you say your car was stolen?’ I speculate after the thought of running hasn’t gotten any easier to comprehend.

‘It won’t work,’ Adam replies quickly as if he has already thought about that option himself. Maybe he has. My husband is now a man trying to figure out which crimes he can get away with and which ones he can’t. I meant every one of my vows on our wedding day, but I don’t remember the part about having to figure out the best way to lie to the police together.

‘Why won’t it work? You can report it stolen. Say you looked outside just before you went to bed and it was gone. That would mean somebody else was behind the wheel on the lane tonight, not you.’

‘They’d never buy it. Plus the times wouldn’t match. Everyone at the party tonight knows I was driving home, and they know what time I left.’

‘Maybe it was stolen just after you got back?’ I say, just making suggestions even though I feel like my brain has checked out and I’m being operated by somebody else now.

‘The neighbours might have seen me come back,’ Adam replies. ‘Maybe the body was found not long after I left. If so, the times won’t match. The emergency call might have gone out to the police before I even made it back here.’

‘Then why did you come back home? You should have left the car somewhere!’

Adam seems surprised by my outburst, and he’s not the only one. I can’t believe I’m making out like there was an easy way out of this. Of course there isn’t. He’s screwed and now so is our family.

‘I didn’t think. I was in shock, I guess. I still am.’

Adam slumps back down onto the sofa with that glazed look in his eyes that I’ve never seen before tonight, but now it’s becoming his permanent appearance. For the first time since he walked through the door, I don’t just feel sorry for myself, my unborn child and the poor guy lying dead in the lane. I feel sorry for my husband too. He’s just killed a man by accident.

How do you get your head around that? 

‘Come here,’ I say to him as I take a seat beside him and put my arms around him. I can still feel the cold on him from when he was outside. It must be freezing out there. I wouldn’t know because I’ve been sat in a warm house all evening.

I’ve been sat here while my husband has been out there making a terrible mistake. 

It’s just as Adam is burying his head into my shoulder and starting to sob again when I realise that I am partly to blame for this mess. It was me who persuaded Adam that he should go to the leaving party tonight. He wasn’t that fussed about it and said he could take it or leave it. He wasn’t even that close to the departing colleague it was in aid of anyway, apparently. But I told him he should go, mainly because it would be one of the last nights where he would get to enjoy himself before Samuel came along and put a stop to frivolous drinking for a while. But if only I had told him to skip the party and stay in with me. We could have spent the evening curled up on the sofa together, talking to my bump and feeling each and every kick it made together. Then we would have gone upstairs to bed and fallen asleep with a smile on our faces because we have so much to look forward to.

A healthy son. Forty more years of life.

Our freedom.

Now that’s ruined. We’ll still have our son, and we still might get the forty years, but they won’t be the same. Adam won’t be free, and without him, I won’t feel free either.

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam says, lifting his head from my tear-stained shoulder and looking at me like a wounded puppy. ‘I should have stayed at the scene. I should have done the right thing. I’m just so scared of losing you and Samuel.’

He puts his hand on my stomach, and I feel like I could cry. I silently urge Samuel to give another kick right now so Adam can feel it. Maybe it will make him feel better. But Samuel doesn’t comply. He only kicks when he wants to, and he never seems to do it when Adam is waiting for it. He just does it for me. I guess that’s how it will always be when he’s born too. He’ll just do things for me.

He will barely even know his dad until his prison sentence is served. 

I suddenly feel nauseous and put my hand to my mouth as I get up and rush to the kitchen. I’ve spent enough time being sick over the last nine months to know when I can keep it in and when I can’t, and this time it is definitely coming out.

I make it to the sink with only a second to spare, and then I feel the awful burning sensation of stomach acid rushing up through my throat.

I dry heave over the clean stainless steel, but nothing comes up. Not yet anyway. But Adam is quickly beside me holding my hair and rubbing my back, and I know he is just trying to be supportive, but it’s not helping right now. I need space.

Space to breathe.

Space to think.

Space to decide if there really is a way out of this sorry mess that we find ourselves in.

I brush Adam’s hand away from me and I feel bad for doing so, but his touch is reminding me of how much I need him. The thought of losing him now while he serves out several years of a prison sentence is unbearable. But I have to try and