Run Away With Me : A fast-paced psychological thriller by Daniel Hurst (free e novels TXT) 📗

concept, and it’s been made even scarier by bringing a child into our relationship. Now it gives me the chance to not only imagine Adam with another woman but my son with one too.

Never mind imagining someone else holding hands with my man, kissing my man and making love to my man; I have imagined her carrying my baby, buying him presents and forming her own bond with it that could one day supersede my own.

I’m aware they are the irrational fears of a tired, anxious and overactive imagination, but I have had the thoughts, and I guess they have now become wedged in my mind so much that I am dreaming about them. I hope that’s all they are. Dreams. Whimsical wisps of silly ideas that occur deep within my REM stage of sleep.

Rather that than an ominous foreboding of my future. 

I already feel thirsty again even though I’ve just had a drink, so I reach out for the cup of juice again, but I’m not looking at what I’m doing properly, and accidentally knock the cup to the floor.

‘Shit!’ I say when I remember that the carpet in here is cream coloured and the liquid inside the cup is bright red.

I grimace as I peer over the edge of the bed and see the red stain on the carpet. I guess Adam’s sister is going to know somebody has been staying here after all. Desperate to find out if there is some way that I can salvage this disastrous situation, I get out of bed and leave the bedroom, having to hold onto the wall as I go because I’m still feeling weak and woozy.

I reach the bottom of the stairs and walk into the kitchen where I search through the cupboard under the sink for anything that I might be able to squirt into the cranberry-coloured stain to make it appear less obvious. I manage to find a bottle of carpet cleaner at the back of the cupboard, and while the cheap branding on the bottle doesn’t make me feel confident that it will work, at least I have a chance now.

I drop to my knees as soon as I get back to the bedroom and start scrubbing the carpet with the liquid from the bottle and an old sponge that I found beside it. At first, it seems like I’m just making it worse, but then I can see the red stain is fading slightly, and that gives me the confidence to work faster.

After using half of the contents of the bottle and a lot of elbow grease, I pause for a break because I’m shattered. It’s as I am taking my break from cleaning the carpet that I look at the bed frame beside me. The base of it is completely flush to the floor. There is no room for anything to get underneath, unlike my bed at home where I keep all sorts of things stored out of sight. I’d miss having that kind of storage space in my own house, but that’s not what is bothering me the most right now. What is bothering me is that Adam told me he found my phone under the bed when he was helping me look for it last night. That was clearly a lie because nothing can get under this bed.

So why did he say that?

And where was my phone if it wasn’t under there? 

23

ADAM

I made it back to our house two minutes before the police car arrived.

I’d just about managed to get inside, make the bed look like it had been slept in and get changed into my scruffiest of clothes before the knock on the door. When I open it, I see two police officers on my doorstep. One male and one female. The man looks to be around my age, but the woman is much younger, possibly early twenties. I believe they would call her a rookie if we were in America, but we’re not, which is a shame because they have the death penalty in certain states there and some people deserve that.

‘Mr Stevenson?’ says the male officer with a hint of a Scottish accent.

‘Hi,’ I reply, doing my best to appear polite but stressed. This is a pre-arranged visit, so I don’t need to act surprised by their appearance, but I do need to look like I didn’t get much sleep last night.

I need to look like a man who is worried about his missing wife. 

‘I’m PC McGregor. This is PC Stone. May we come inside?’

‘Of course.’

I step aside and let the two polite PC’s in before closing the door quickly behind them. I imagine several of our neighbours are peeping out of their windows right now to try and find out why there is a police car parked on the street. Nosy neighbours. Curtain twitchers.

Welcome to life in sleepy suburbia.

But they don’t need to try and spy on my house today to find out what is going on. They’ll read about it soon enough in the newspapers.

‘Would you like a drink?’ I ask the two officers if only to break the awkward silence, but they both decline, so I show them through to the living room where we all take a seat on the sofa before PC McGregor gets to the point.

‘We’re here to have a look around the home and see if there is anything that we can use that might help us in our search for Laura. But we have a couple of questions first, if that’s okay?’

‘Sure,’ I reply, making sure to remain sitting on the edge of the sofa cushion and not recline as I normally would under more relaxing circumstances. I need to look like a man who can’t relax until he knows where his wife is, instead of a guy who would love nothing more than to put his feet up right now and watch the telly.

‘Laura is thirty-five weeks pregnant, is that correct?’

I nod my head.

‘How has the pregnancy been for her?’

‘What