The Woman At The Door, Daniel Hurst [world best books to read TXT] 📗

is. I’ve got enough on my plate with work, and by the sounds of Maria’s call, even more has been added to it. I could do without my personal life being a problem too. That’s why I hope that Rebecca is okay and that she’s had a good day. Or just a boring day. As long as it’s been normal.

No drama. No incident. No bloody woman at the front door.

Just a plain old boring Monday.

Fingers crossed.

13

REBECCA

I’ve been home since lunchtime, not long after I was dragged away from behind the heavy wheels of a ten-tonne machine that could easily have ended my life. I was shaken up after the incident, just like anyone else would be, so I was allowed to go home after I’d been seen by the Health and Safety Officer on site.

I’m physically fine, and no harm was done in the end, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be investigated by my colleagues. I feel bad for creating paperwork for them and also for the fact that what happened has to be logged as a “near-miss,” which is not something that is generally well-received in health and safety circles. Managers will have to meet and discuss what happened and why in order to ensure that something like that can’t happen again. Blame will also have to be attributed somewhere, but there is no one to blame for what happened but me.

It’s my fault I was walking across a busy building site in a daydream, and it’s my fault that I almost got killed by a reversing excavator.

I owned up to my mistake as soon as it happened and made sure that nobody else could face punishment for the incident. But still, it’s not a good look for me, my career and the career of anybody who is in charge of maintaining safety on the site.

There was a large number scribbled on the whiteboard in the site canteen which everybody who worked there got to see on a daily basis. It was the number to show how many accidents or near-misses had occurred since construction began. Ever since the project started six months ago, that number has been zero. But now it has changed.

Now it is a number one, and I am responsible for that.

I’m a bloody statistic.

Site managers will lose recommendations and bonuses because that number didn’t stay at zero for the entirety of the project.

All because of me and my silly behaviour.

All because I was too distracted thinking about that woman at the door.

Now I’m at home lying on the bed even though it’s barely six, and I never go horizontal this early. On a normal day, I’d either be in the kitchen preparing something for dinner or I’d be at the gym working up a sweat after a busy day on site. I’d be active. I’d be useful. I’d be normal. Yet here I am, being of no use to anybody. All because some stranger told me something that may or may not be true on Saturday night.

I hear the sound of keys in the front door downstairs. Sam’s home. That means it’s only a few seconds until he sees that I’m home too. He won’t be shocked about that, but he will be shocked to see me lying on the bed. He’ll want to know why. He’ll want to know if I’m okay.

So what am I going to tell him?

I hear the front door close, and his car keys drop onto the small table in the hallway, and then I hear him call out to me. I’m tempted to jump off the bed quickly and pretend that everything is okay. Maybe I don’t have to tell him about the near-miss at work. Maybe he never has to know that his wife was very nearly squashed today. But it’s not fair to lie. Not for him or for me. Honesty is the most important element in any successful marriage, so I have to be honest. There is no other choice.

Just like Sam is being honest with me?

I have to hope so.

‘Hi, love. I’m up here!’ I call out to him, and I hear his footsteps climbing the staircase a few seconds later.

I bet he’s starving, and I wonder if he’s disappointed that I haven’t started cooking anything. Possibly but he would never say anything if so. He doesn’t expect me to have dinner on the table for him every night when he gets home.

Unlike Steve.

His poor wife must live in their kitchen.

Having decided to be upfront and honest with Sam, I stay on the bed until he has entered the room, not making any attempt to pretend like I haven’t had a bad day at work.

‘Are you okay?’ he asks as soon as he spots me.

‘Yeah, I’m fine. But there was almost an accident on site.’

‘What?’ Sam cries, rushing towards me and sitting on the bed beside me. ‘What happened?’

‘It was stupid. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going and almost walked into the path of an excavator.’

‘You did what?’

‘I’m fine. But it had to go down as a near miss, and they sent me home for the day.’

‘Are you in trouble?’

‘No, nothing like that. It’s just to make sure I’m okay and not in shock or anything like that.’

‘Jesus, was it that bad?’

‘I had to be dragged out of the way.’

‘Oh my God, Rebecca. Are you serious?’

I shrug and nod my head.

‘How did this happen? Why weren’t you paying attention to where you were going?’

‘I don’t know. I guess with what happened this weekend, I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate on other things.’

Sam goes quiet at that, and I wonder what he is thinking.

‘But there’s no harm done, and it won’t happen again,’ I add, hoping that will stop him worrying about me.

‘This is ridiculous. I’m going to call the police.’

I watch as Sam takes out his mobile phone.

‘What are you talking about? What have the police got to do with anything?’

‘You almost died today because you were reeling