Page 65 of My Husband's Wife
An owl hoots which adds to her sense of unease. She feels its piercing yellow eyes on her but when she looks up, all she can see is the moon. Buster barks again. ‘It’s okay, Buster. Mummy’s here.’ She turns her key in the lock and gently pushes the door. Buster dashes past her feet, into the woods. ‘Buster’. He’s gone. She steps into a puddle of urine by the door. His harness is usually hung on the coat hook by the door but it’s not there.
She turns the light on and gasps at the mess. Sofa cushions have been strewn across the carpet. The coffee table has been smashed into chunks of wood, and Emily’s baby basket is broken. What has Theo done? She thinks of her poor little dog. He must have been terrified.
She hurries to the kitchen to look for the lead, which isn’t in any of its usual places like on the back of the chair or flung over the kitchen door. The wedding ring she found glints on the worktop. She rustles through the kitchen cupboard, searching for the raven toy but that’s also gone. As she steps back, she kicks Buster’s harness. Grabbing it, she hurries to the front door.
‘Buster,’ she calls from the doorstep. Her heart bangs harder.
Frantic barks echo through the woods.
‘Buster. Why are you doing this to me,’ she whispers, her voice quivering as she turns the light off and hurries out of the house. She thinks of her brown-haired stalker and Theo’s mother. Maybe one of them messed the cottage up in a temper. The van had to belong to one of them. Buster whines. She runs in the rain, crashing through several puddles on her way to the gate. As soon as she arrives at the shed, she calls out to Buster, who barks frantically. Hands shaking, she nudges the shed door open and lets out a shriek. There’s a panel under the hatch and it’s open. In the gap, she spots boxes upon boxes of disposable brown-eyed contact lenses. She drops the harness and touches some of the boxes in disbelief.
She can’t breathe. It’s as if her throat is closing. Buster’s barking stops. She runs out of the shed and accidentally kicks an animal feeding bowl. He’s gone. She spins in every direction, trying to spot her beloved dog. The police – she needs to call them now. Her phone isn’t in her pocket. She left it in the side of the door of her car.
‘Buster,’ she whispers as she hears the crack of a branch followed by footsteps approaching from behind. She turns her head but can’t see anyone so she sprints. After stumbling into her car, she locks herself in and prays that Buster will come to her. Someone was out there, following her. The police. She reaches for her phone but it’s gone. She goes to turn the keys in the ignition but they’re also gone. Then she spots a note on the passenger seat. Thick marker print on white paper that she can just about read.
Madison. We need to talk. Please go into the house and don’t leave until I get back. I will explain everything in a short while but lock the door and wait for me. I won’t be long. Trust me. I love you. Stay inside and don’t answer the door to anyone. Theo. X
Explain everything! She wants to leave with her dog but he’s taken her keys and phone, and now Buster is missing. How dare he tell her not to leave the house. Every worry she’s had over the past few weeks swirls around in her head. She has no choice but to step out of the car. There is no way she’s going to wait in the house for who knows what to happen. As soon as she has Buster, she’ll leave on foot without her phone if she has to. One thing she now knows for sure is that Theo is close by. It must have been him creeping around in the woods. She takes a deep breath to try to control her nerves. Buster. She thinks of what Camille had been saying to her. Theo has isolated her; she isn’t losing her mind – it was Theo playing her. Is she walking into a well-planned trap? She thought of the mess in the house. Nothing about today had been planned which is why he’d lost it.
Buster whines again. As she steps into the messy hallway and lounge, she hears him scratching an upstairs door. She creeps up the stairs, one by one, not turning a single light then she finally reaches their bedroom. When she opens the door, Buster crashes through her legs and darts around in the dark. She goes to pick him up but he wriggles out of her grip. His lead – she left it in the shed. Buster runs downstairs into the kitchen. Without calling him, Madison follows and steps into the darkness. The moon’s light shines through the kitchen window and she can see that the ring has gone. Buster barks at the back door. ‘Buster, shush,’ she whispers, but she can’t get him to stop barking and scratching at the back door.
Her phone lights up on the windowsill. She runs across the kitchen and grabs it. It’s Camille. She presses to answer but Theo snatches it from her hand and stamps on it.
‘You couldn’t just wait for another minute. I told you we had to talk,’ he yells.
All she can focus on are the whites of his eyes as he stares. She steps back into one of his shoes, nearly tripping over it. ‘Theo…’
‘You’re just like the others and I thought you were different. I love you and look what you did to me today. We were going to move away and start a new life but no, shit just follows me around.’
He’s crying. Madison doesn’t know whether to reach out and try to comfort him, but he smashed her phone and he never mentioned having a stalker. She wants the truth, about Eva, about the brown-haired woman and the fact that she hasn’t got baby brain or whatever he liked to call it. Camille would call it gaslighting. ‘What are you talking about, Theo?’ Theo. She’d seen the contact lenses – the lie. ‘You’re Hugo, aren’t you?’
‘No, no, no, no, no…’
Madison flinches as he slams his hand on the worktop.
‘Tell me about the ring, Hugo.’ She has to push him for answers even though she’s on the verge of hyperventilating. She loved him, or still loves him – it’s complicated, but she needs the truth. ‘Tell me about your mother, tell me about Eva, Caiden and the woman with the brown hair who tried to crash our wedding earlier. Tell me about her and Zach, and why they were at our house.’ She won’t stop, not now she’s revealing her hand. There’s no going back now. ‘Tell me about the contact lenses in the shed. Tell me about the photo of you and your sister, Emily. Is it even you and Emily in the photo? Who’s the boy in the newspaper cutting?’ The room is silent. ‘Tell me,’ Madison yells as Buster barks relentlessly.
‘No.’ His raises his arms then runs towards her roaring, his eyes wide open.
She opens the back door and runs into the rain as fast as she can.
‘Stop. You have to come back.’
She glances over her shoulder. She can’t get around the side of the house. He’s standing on the path, blocking it off. She might be able to use one of his devices in the cabin to call the police, but she has to get there first and she has to lock him out. The door’s jammed. She shoulder-barges it and stumbles into the small hallway. As his hand is about to grab her hoodie, she regains her balance and slams the door in his face, then she locks it.
‘Open it now,’ he shouts as he pounds against the wood. ‘Open the door or I will smash it down.’
A bang from behind the store room door makes Madison shriek. She needs to get away from whoever is in there, so she runs around his office looking for something to make a call on, but there isn’t anything. His computer would take a while to turn on – but it was worth a try. Her hand falls onto one of the twin photos as she reaches for the mouse then a mighty crash leads to glass spraying underneath the closed blinds. Theo forces a foot through. She sees his iPad on the floor and grabs it.
The store room. She hurries out and closes the office door before placing a hand on the store room door handle. Another bang comes from behind the door. She doesn’t want to go in there, but she can’t leave through the front door and Theo is in the office, swearing under his breath. The office goes silent and that silence is scarier than any noise. She presses the handle and gasps. The brown-haired woman is slumped over a desk and her eyes are almost closed and she’s slurring her words. On the table behind her is a bottle of vodka and there are tablets scattered on the floor by her feet.
Madison turns Theo’s iPad on but there’s no internet connection. She turns her head to the half-battered wooden crate with splintered wood sticking out of the back end, and the woman mutters some quiet words.
‘Eva’s gone. He took her.’
Fifty-Seven
Nicole
