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

know about the baby because I am going to tell him and then we are going to enjoy this special time together. I’m going to do my best to push all thoughts of my past out of my mind and focus them on the future instead. Bradley is history. Adam is, was and always will be the man for me. I just lost my way for a while, but I’m back on track now. It’s just a shame I hadn’t ended things with Bradley before I fell pregnant.

I’m not even sure how it happened because we were as careful as all of the other times but what’s done is done, and I can’t change it. I’ve also never entertained the idea of not having the baby. I don’t want to go through an abortion, and I definitely don’t want to deprive the life inside of me of the chance to exist just because I made a mistake that needs to be covered up. I will have the baby, everybody will think that it is Adam’s, and I will spend the rest of my marriage being the best wife I can be.

But I do need Adam to play his part. Either he leaves his job soon, or he finds a better way to cope with it because I can’t have him coming home so moody all the time, and I certainly don’t want him drinking as much as he has been when there is a baby to look after. He thinks I haven’t noticed, but I have. I’ll see how he takes this news first. Maybe it will be the making of him. Maybe he will go back to the way he was a few weeks ago, before he started acting differently around me. And maybe this whole thing will work out well in the end.

I can’t predict the future, but I think everything is going to be okay.

Isn’t it?

37

ADAM

The thought of my wife with another man’s baby inside of her is the one that has led me to this very moment right here in this cottage. Laura is upstairs resting on the bed. The TV satellite dish is lying on the ground in pieces outside. And I’m counting down the hours until all of this is over and I finally get my revenge.

It was eight months ago when I came home from work to find Laura holding a positive pregnancy test in her hands. I’d already had three beers before I’d driven home that evening, but I disguised it well enough, and she was too excited about her news to notice I was tipsy as she threw her arms around me and told me that we were having a baby.

At the time, I did think that it was possible that the baby was mine. While I knew about the affair, I believed it to be over because I hadn’t seen Laura and Bradley together for a while. The last few times I had followed Laura had resulted in nothing more than seeing her leave the office and catch the train home. The sneaky visits to the pubs, restaurants and hotels had seemed to come to an end, not that it was much consolation for them happening in the first place. I also knew that we had been intimate with each other a few weeks earlier, so it was plausible that I was the father.

It was plausible right up until the moment I saw the text message flash up on Laura’s mobile phone.

It was an appointment reminder from Carlisle Hospital confirming her three month scan the next day. The problem with that was that Laura had told me that her scan was in a fortnight. I said nothing about the message, and when I asked her later that night about her plans for the following day, she said nothing about going to the hospital for a scan. That’s when I knew that the secrets hadn’t just ended when her affair with Bradley had. She still had reason to lie to me, which made me wonder why she was doing it. But there was only one possible explanation for her to lie about dates with the baby.

She had got pregnant before that night we had sex.

It was Bradley’s baby, not mine.

I wanted to be as sure as I could be before I jumped to any conclusions, so I did my best to catch Laura in another lie surrounding the pregnancy. That came a few months later when I insisted on Laura having another scan because I had been too busy at work to accompany her to the earlier ones. I waited until after the scan while Laura was getting changed before I asked the nurse about how best to prepare for the due date of November 14th. The nurse corrected me and said the due date was 24th October.

Laura definitely got pregnant earlier than she told me she did.

I thought the night my best friend broke the news about my wife’s affair was as bad as it could get. But that day in the hospital when I knew for sure that my wife was lying to me about our baby was far worse. That was when I really started drinking heavily.

But it was also when I met Gemma.

Gemma has saved my life. I have no doubt that I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for her. She found me at my lowest point, and she picked me up and got me feeling like I used to feel before my wife ripped my heart out.

She also gave me the idea on how to get my own back on Laura and Bradley.

I open the fridge and take out one of the beers inside that I picked up from the supermarket earlier. I didn’t get many because this isn’t a holiday, but I can allow myself the odd one because I’ve worked hard over these last few days and I deserve a little break before the big finale.