The Passenger by Daniel Hurst (great book club books TXT) 📕

being pushed under a moving train or coming into contact with peanuts when they are severely allergic. Of course, my intention at the time was never to kill those men, just like I never intended to kill Charles. I was merely doing what I needed to do to survive. I only wanted to disable them so I could make my escape and preserve my safety, but in all three cases, the men died.

Do I feel bad about what happened?

Of course.

But would I do it all again if the circumstances were the same?

After many sleepless nights since, I have to say that yes, I would.

I’m not going to regret accidentally killing a man who was trying to rape me, just like I’m not going to regret killing the two men who threatened my life and the life of my daughter. The simple fact is that they would still be alive now if they were good men. All I have ever tried to do is get what I want, but I never did it to the detriment of another human being. Unfortunately, not everybody has that same control. Some people try to get what they want regardless of who they will hurt in the process. Those three men were like that, and the world is a better place now they are no longer in it.

I sit back in my seat and think about how lucky I am to be able to do what I love every day. I no longer commute on a busy train. I no longer have to sit in meetings and pretend to look interested. And I no longer have to put on a wig and pretend to be someone I’m not as I sit across a table from a guy who is paying me to be on a date with him.

All the hard work and sacrifices have been worth it, and while it was a wild and unpredictable ride to get to this point, now I have accomplished my goal. I wake up every day in a lovely cottage in the countryside and write words on a page. It’s all I ever wanted to do, and now I get to do it. I even have a publisher interested in reading this book when it’s finished.

Oh my.

But perhaps the best thing to come out of this whole thing is not my new career, but my new relationship with my daughter. After years of arguments, door slamming, and disappointment, we are now getting on better than ever. A lot of it has to do with what we went through together on that fateful day three months ago when she was held at knifepoint, and I was blackmailed into opening my safe. I guess no relationship would be the same after something like that. But I think the main thing that the whole experience taught us was that we weren’t as different as we thought.

We’re both stubborn, and while that led to a lot of arguments in the past, it also led to neither one of us giving up easily in the face of danger that day. We both kept secrets, me with my past and her with her “boyfriend”, and we both now know that keeping things from each other is more trouble than it’s worth. We’re also both dreamers, her with travelling and me with writing, and while that used to be the cause of many disagreements, we can now see that we share that same zest to achieve our goals that so many other people in society lack.

I used to think we argued all the time because we were so different.

But it turned out it’s because we are too similar.

Thinking of my daughter now makes me wish I could speak to her, but that isn’t an easy thing to do these days. That’s because she’s currently over six thousand miles away exploring Vietnam while I’m sitting here in this cosy little hideaway in the English countryside. I do miss Louise, but I’m happy she has gone because I know it’s what she wants to do. Once the dust had settled after the events at St Pancras Station and I had made it home safely with the money intact, I told my daughter that I would give her the funds to go travelling. To my surprise, she initially refused, telling me that I had made enough sacrifices for her over the years and that money would be better spent pursuing my dreams instead of hers. But as always, I disagreed with my daughter, only this time it didn’t lead to an argument. It led to her wrapping her arms around me and declaring me to be the best mum in the world. While I’m not sure I will ever deserve that lofty title, I do know that she is happier now than she has been in a long time, so I must have done something right.

It’s been a couple of days since we last spoke, the wonders of modern technology allowing her to video call me from an internet café in Hanoi and update me on her adventures. She’s already been through Thailand, and her next stop is Indonesia, but she somehow managed to find the time in her busy schedule to give me a quick call and tell me that she loves me. The money I gave her is allowing her to see the world, and I know she will return a more grown-up and well-rounded individual. That’s if she returns at all. She’s already talking about the possibility of heading to Australia once she is done exploring Asia, which sounded expensive to me, right up until the moment she told me she had already been looking into how to get a job to fund her stay while she is over there.

My daughter talking about getting a job?

I had to hold on to the desk to stop myself falling over in shock.

But the best thing about seeing my daughter so happy now is that it makes me