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

when I get back, so Adam doesn’t see them. But my biggest concern right now is not my dirty clothes. It’s my mobile phone lying in the road.

Is it broken?

I rush over to it and see that the back part of the device has separated from the front. Fortunately, the screen hasn’t cracked, and there are no broken pieces anywhere so all I need to do is attach the back on again and I’m good to go. But it is as I am doing that when I notice something.

Looking into the exposed part of my phone, I see that the sim card is not in there.

Did it fall out when I dropped it?

I reattach the back and use the torchlight from the battery to light up the road to help me look. But there is no sign of the sim card. It surely would have been here if it had fallen out just now.

So where is it?

It’s only after ten minutes of looking for it that a thought occurs to me. Maybe this is why I couldn’t find a signal anywhere along this road.

Maybe the sim card was never in there to start with.

I think back to last night when my phone was missing from my bedside table. How Adam claimed to have found it under the bed. How it was strange for it to not only have left my bedside table and ended up on the floor but how I later found out it was impossible for it to get under the bed.

Did Adam find it so quickly because he was the one who took it?

Did he take it because he was secretly removing the sim card?

Did he do it so that I could never get a signal again even if I did leave the cottage?

I stand there in the middle of the road with several worrying thoughts running through my tired mind. If I go left, I can keep walking until I reach the village. If I go right, I will go back to the cottage.

At this moment, I’m not sure which way to go.

27

ADAM

I’m standing by the window looking out over the dark hill and waiting for Laura to get back from wherever she has gone. She thinks she was so quiet leaving the cottage, but I heard her.

I heard her get out of bed. I heard her zipping up her coat downstairs. And I heard her closing the front door, although she really did try her best to do it quietly.

I went to the window just after I heard her leave, and it was there when I saw the torchlight moving down the dirt track in the direction of the main road. I can guess what she is up to. She is going to try and get a phone signal so she can check the news reports for herself. It’s not that I think she doesn’t trust me with the information I have given her. It’s just that I know she will be desperate to see the news articles with her own eyes to answer the many questions she has about the victim and the accident.

Those are questions that she would never ask me because she wouldn’t want to be insensitive when she thinks I am battling such inner turmoil. Therefore, she has decided to sneak out of the cottage in the middle of the night and go and check the internet before coming back and acting as if she was never gone when we wake up together in the morning.

It’s a cute plan, and I’m not at all surprised by it.

I’ll just have to pretend like I never knew it happened.

I remain by the window as I wait for the sight of the torchlight on the track to return which will tell me that Laura is on her way back. Then all I will have to do is get back into bed and pretend to be asleep as she creeps back into the bedroom satisfied of my cluelessness. But that’s all she will be satisfied with because her trip will have been a fruitless one. She won’t have been able to find a phone signal out on that road, and she won’t have been able to check the internet and learn that the news articles about the hit and run don’t exist. That’s because I took the sim card out of her phone last night.

Without that, there isn’t much she can do with her mobile now.

I’d known that the only risk to the plan was if Laura decided to leave this cottage and go far enough away from it so that she could use her phone. But I also knew that simply hiding her mobile from her would be too suspicious. Therefore, I decided to allow her to keep thinking that she had her phone to hand at all times and that she could go and use it if she really wanted to.

She never has to know that it won’t work properly because it’s missing a vital part of its inventory.

I know there is a chance of her finding out the sim card is missing, but it’s a tiny one. I suspect she will have just walked down the road looking for a signal but eventually given up when she couldn’t get one and be on her way back now. The chances of her suspecting there is something more at play and taking her phone apart to look inside it are minimal. But it is possible. What if she does know that her sim card is missing? What if she figures out that was why she couldn’t find her phone when she woke up last night?

I’d taken her device from her bedside table and removed the sim card in the bathroom before I returned and found her already awake and looking for it. I was able to cover up what I’d done quite easily, and I’m sure Laura has no concerns about any of what happened, but she might