The Marriage K.L. Slater (classic romance novels TXT) 📖

‘Cool,’ Tyra said, and dashed over to her desk to collect her things, leaving Irma with a hollow sense of hopelessness.

They might be able to find out what had happened to Coral and even charge the perpetrator, but they’d never give her young son his family back.

Sometimes, life was so incredibly cruel.

Thirty-Nine Jill

October 2019

When I started to drive away from Tom and Bridget’s house after confronting her about why she’d been with Audrey, I saw my son still hovering at the front door, the bright hallway light like a halo around his broad shoulders.

My heart ached but I didn’t linger there, didn’t wave. For the first time, I felt as angry with my son as I did with Bridget. Angry that he couldn’t see what was so apparent to me, that Bridget was keeping secrets from him, playing some kind of game with both of us.

I drove away without looking back and headed across town to Audrey’s house. It was a twenty-minute drive, and on the way I tried calling her again, with exactly the same result as before. Her phone was off, but this time it wouldn’t even let me leave a message, presumably because her voicemail box was full of all my previous pleas for her to get in touch.

When I arrived at her modest two-bedroom semi in Mansfield Woodhouse, I sat in the car and took in the house. It was fairly obvious Audrey wasn’t home, because her car wasn’t parked out front.

The house was neat but very plain, nothing to make it stand out amongst the other similar plots on the quiet street. It reflected Audrey’s personality. She didn’t like to draw attention to herself. She operated in the background in all areas. At the shop, she liked to hang back and let people browse to their hearts’ content. She wasn’t the sort to jump on customers the second they walked through the door and start the hard sell.

A reliable, sensible person, she was always there when you needed her. The perfect friend, or at least that was how I’d thought of her up to a few hours ago. Worry nibbled at the edges of my annoyance. Where could she have got to?

I got out of the car and walked up the short path. I rang the bell and knocked on the front door, but I wasn’t surprised when there was no answer. I walked around the side of the house and leaned over the small gate to access the security bolt I knew she’d had fitted about halfway down.

I’d been in the small, neat back garden in fine weather many times over the years. Audrey would make us a simple chicken or prawn salad – never barbecue food, she hated the mess – and we’d sit out at her little round wrought-iron table and eat, laugh and put the world to rights, sometimes for hours on end. My heart ached when I thought about how long it had been since those days, way before Tom went to prison.

It shocked me to realise the enormous slice of time that had passed in my life with nothing to fill it. Ten whole years of nothing but waiting and planning for a fantasy future, and for what? For Tom to marry Jesse’s mother and ruin any chance he had of living a normal life. To pass up having children of his own, grandchildren I’d visualised so vividly I almost felt I already knew them.

I’d been wasting my own life trying to plan his.

I cupped my hands around my eyes and pressed my face close to the kitchen window. The blind was up and the kitchen was tidy. I saw that Audrey still had the photograph pinned up of the two of us eating fish and chips on Padstow harbour, summer 2009. I felt a pang of regret.

With my warm breath smearing the glass, I looked around the rest of the kitchen to see if anything had changed since I’d last been there, but all seemed to be exactly the same.

Then something caught my eye on the shortest bit of worktop, by the kitchen sink.

My heartbeat lurched up into my throat and I pressed my forehead hard to the window, trying to convince myself that I must have made a mistake. I hadn’t. The blue and white striped scarf I was staring at was too distinctive to confuse with any other, and I realised in one breathless rush that ripped through my body that I had been an utter fool.

I had been blind and so stupid not to see how Audrey had been betraying me.

Forty Ellis

Ellis was trying to concentrate on his game but stuff kept getting in the way.

His mum had been acting very strange. It might not seem that way to other people, but Ellis knew her. He knew how she usually behaved.

When she’d got back from her meeting at his school, her phone had rung, and she’d jumped up and taken the call in another room. Ellis was fairly sure she’d arranged to meet someone – possibly a man. He wasn’t sure what made him think that, maybe it was her pink cheeks and bright eyes when she came back in the room.

It had happened a couple of times before, too. She’d get a phone call and go out of the room to take it. Then, a short time afterwards, she’d casually mention that she had to go out somewhere and did he fancy going to his nan’s house for an hour or two?

Ellis loved being at his nan’s house, much preferred it to being at home most of the time. But things were now very different because the murderer had moved in. That was what he called Tom in his head because that’s exactly what he was.

The living room door opened and his mum came back in the room.

‘Hey, Ellis, I’ve got to pop out to pick up