The Man She Married: A gripping psychological thriller with a heart-pounding twist(2)

I trudge back to Waverley Gardens with my purchases in several carrier bags. As ever, my heart lifts a little when I round the bend in the crescent and see the house. My house.



Of course, it’s our house now, but for a few years, it was just mine.

People frequently commented on this. ‘That’s weird,’ they’d say to me, ‘a single girl living in a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a huge garden, all on her own.’

Depending on my mood at the time, I might or might not have challenged them. I inherited a large sum of money – enough to buy the house mortgage-free and start a business of my own – when my mother died from breast cancer. At the time, I was twenty-five and my brother David was twenty-seven. The money from Mum’s estate came straight to us because we’d already lost our father to congenital heart disease eight years earlier.

‘You’re so lucky,’ was the other thing people would say to me. Again, depending on how I was feeling, I might simply agree or I might point out that I only had the security of this lovely house in one of West London’s leafier inner suburbs because I was an orphan. Did they consider that being lucky? I’d lost both my parents, whom I loved dearly. I’d lost their protection. And being well-off compared to my struggling twenty-something peers was very isolating. People used the word ‘heiress’ about me in the same way you might say ‘werewolf’.

You’d think owning the perfect party pad would put you at the centre of things socially, but the parties I went to back then continued to be thrown in grotty rented flats. I actually lost friends because of my ‘luck’. My financial status created a gulf, socially. I knew my house was too big to live in alone, and I tried renting out a room to someone – a friend of a friend – but it didn’t work out. She treated the place like a squat, so I stopped. I still planned to fill the place, but with a husband and children instead of lodgers. It turned out that was a lot harder to achieve than I had imagined. Potential boyfriends were intimidated by my having more financial clout than them. It hurt their alpha pride.

But not Dominic. He wasn’t bothered about it in the least. He was different to all the others.



I walk up the tiled pathway, drop the bags in the porch and grope for my key, then kick the door open with my foot, hefting the shopping through the hall and into the kitchen. By the time I’ve made a salad, arranged the cheese on the cheeseboard and prepared the fish, it’s six o’clock. I text Dominic.

When will you be home? X





I head to the bathroom with the pregnancy test kit, having forced myself to wait until I’d prepared supper before using it. As I rip off the cellophane packaging with impatient fingers, Dom replies.

Not long now – maybe 30–40 minutes. X





I position myself over the toilet bowl and pee onto the plastic stick. While I’m waiting the required two minutes, I start running a bath, throwing in a generous amount of scented oil. With the test stick positioned on the edge of the bath, I lower myself into the warm, fragrant water and allow myself a brief, blissful soak, before I reach for the stick.

There’s a single word in the second window: Pregnant.

I stare at it for several minutes with a stupid grin on my face, letting the water cool around me. Then I haul myself out of the bath and go back into the bedroom. I’m about to place the test stick on Dominic’s pillow as the Valentine’s surprise to end all Valentine’s surprises, but my excitement gets the better of me and I send him a photo of the positive test result captioned with just a pregnant woman emoji, a baby bottle emoji and finally a shocked face emoji. We don’t normally engage in text banter during the working day, but today is not normal. Not at all.

I dry myself and moisturise my skin all over, lingering to cradle the slight curve of my stomach. Then I put on some pretty lace underwear and choose a dress from the rail in the dressing room. I decide against pink – too much of a cliché, despite the evening’s clichéd theme – and opt instead for a wine-red wrap dress and nude heels. I carefully straighten my shock of mouse-brown hair, then twist it into a messy updo and create what women’s magazines would call ‘an evening look’ with my make-up. Will Dominic notice? I wonder. Probably. He’s never liked me looking what he calls ‘tarted up’. But lately he’s been making more of an effort with the compliments and positive reinforcement.

I glance over at my phone screen for a response to the test stick picture, but there are no new notifications. He must be behind the wheel of his car and not looking at his messages.

Downstairs, the house feels chilly, so I light the fire in the sitting room, adding a few candles for good measure. There isn’t any food preparation left to do, so I toss some crisps into a bowl and get out the champagne flutes.

But then I hesitate. The problem with opening champagne – especially pink champagne on Valentine’s night – is that it requires an audience. It would look a little odd if I started drinking it before Dominic gets home, and besides, I need to watch my alcohol intake now. Instead, I pull a half-empty bottle of white wine from the door of the fridge and pour just an inch into a glass, topping it up with fizzy water. Not enough to do any harm to the baby, I reason, just a taster. I take the glass through to drink in front of the fire, curling my feet under me on the sofa and flicking through a copy of Elle Decoration.