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

man I am really married to. But I don’t want to believe that, so I won’t. I’m an adult, and I can believe what I want.

Therefore, I believe that my husband has been, is and always will be faithful to me.

‘I really wish you’d let me answer the door,’ Sam says as he sits on his side of the bed and pulls off his socks. ‘If only I’d have seen her.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go to sleep,’ I say, shuffling down in the bed until my head is on the pillow. But if only it was that easy. I’m going to be wide awake all night, and I know it.

I’m going to be thinking about that woman and my husband together.

As if reading my mind, Sam leans over and gives me a kiss on the head before telling me to try and not think about it anymore. I give him a weak smile before nodding my head and rolling over so that my back is turned to him. I’m not being purposefully distant. I just need to think logically, and I can’t do that by looking at him because there is too much emotion there.

The bed shakes as Sam joins me under the duvet, and there is a little rummaging on his side before the bedside lamp goes off and we are plunged into darkness. I feel his arm go around my waist, a move that would normally make me smile and feel incredibly loved, but tonight, it makes me feel sick.

That’s because it’s almost a reminder of what I stand to lose if this turns out to be true.

I couldn’t stay with him if he has cheated on me. I could try, but it wouldn’t work. I know what I’m like, and I’d never be able to get that thought of the other woman out of my head. The thing is, Sam knows this because I’ve told him as much before. Not in a serious or firm way, just when we have been joking around about that kind of thing. But it always ends with Sam saying the same thing. He tells me that he would never be unfaithful because he saw what his father did to his mother and how much pain it caused. That always added an extra buffer to the trust I had for my husband as if his experiences meant there was even less of a chance he would do anything. But as I lie here now in the dark, the paranoid thoughts begin to come, as they have a nasty habit of doing when all is quiet at the end of the day. They are the thoughts that say if Sam’s old man could cheat, so could he. Maybe it’s in the genes.

Like father, like son.

I shake my head as if to send the horrible thoughts scurrying back to whichever dark hole they came out of, and to make sure the thoughts don’t return, I roll over and face my husband. Even though we can’t see each other in this light, I know our faces are only a few inches apart. I can feel his breath on my cheeks, and while sometimes that is annoying when I’m trying to sleep, tonight I tell myself that it is reassuring.

It’s my bed he is in. Not hers.

He is here with me. He is mine.

He is a good man. I have nothing to worry about.

Nothing at all.

7

SAM

I am a good man. I don’t know what I did to deserve a woman coming to my house and making false accusations, but I can rest easy in the end because my conscience is clear. That must have been how I was able to fall asleep relatively quickly last night. Now it’s morning, and the sunlight streaming through the curtains over the window makes everything seem much better than it did a few hours ago when everything was dark, including my wife’s mood.

I usually hate that so much light comes through our bedroom curtains because it wakes me up on sunny mornings, and I have been meaning to get a black-out blind to put over the window. But like many things in my life, including charity work and skiing holidays, I never seem to get around to doing it. That could be why I have woken up now. It’s too bright here.

Or maybe it’s just because I have that mysterious woman on my mind again.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, I had an idea, and it’s one that I am going to explore today. It was as I was cursing my bad luck for not knowing what this woman looked like when I remembered that our neighbour, Steve, has a camera on his driveway. That means it is possible that it captured footage of the woman arriving and leaving my house last night, and if so, there is potentially a way for me to see what she looks like and see if I can place her from anywhere. I’ll have to ask Steve, of course, but I can do that. But I will have to make up a cover story because I can hardly tell him the truth, which is that I’m trying to find the woman who accused me of cheating on my wife. I’m not sure that would go down well. It definitely wouldn’t go down well if Steve’s wife got wind of it. I’ll just have to make up something about someone playing pranks at our door last night and a need to check if any kids were hanging around. He’ll buy that.

I’m eager to get up and get on with my plan, but Rebecca is still asleep, and I don’t want to disturb her, so I lie still and occupy myself with my mobile phone. That’s when I have the idea of scrolling through my friends online and making a shortlist of all the blonde women I have on there. I could show them to my wife to see if she identifies any of