Chapter 51 Freya
FREYA
I don’t remember finding my shoes or putting my coat on, but I’m at the bottom of the path with my keys in my hand when I remember I can’t go anywhere.
“Nearly done,” says the man who’s about to lift the windscreen from Charlie’s car.
“I’m sorry, I have to go…,” I say impatiently.
“I’ll be quick,” he says.
I stand there, having no choice but to wait.
“It looks like a bullet’s hit it,” he says, concentrating on the job in hand.
That’s exactly what it looks like. The glass has shattered outward from the point of impact, like a giant spider’s web, spreading into the corners of the passenger’s side of the window.
“How on earth has that happened?” I ask, shocked at the extent of the damage.
“It might have started as a chip, but this looks like it’s been hit by something bigger. Maybe an animal or something.…”
I shudder at the thought.
“Happens all the time in these parts,” he goes on. “Driving down those lanes is like an obstacle course.”
Didn’t I know it?
I can still hear the crunching of metal, see the twisting of the handlebars as my bike was swallowed under the car, before being spat out again. Its front wheel buckled, turned in on itself, and the chain managed to wrap itself around a pedal, throttling it so it couldn’t move.
The revving reverberates inside my head as I look at the shattered windscreen. The white reverse lights scorch my vision as I try to remember anything about the car that had knocked me to the ground. The thought that it might be one I recognize is slowly poisoning my veins.
Would he? Could he? Knowing that I’m carrying our baby.
No, he hasn’t got it in him—no matter how much he might hate me right now.
But who is this woman who has so cruelly passed herself off as Harry’s mum, and what has Charlie got to do with any of it?
Had he sent her to scam me? Is he really in that much financial trouble that he needs the money that badly?
It’s easier to pretend it’s about money than about me. Though he surely can’t be stupid enough to think that twenty thousand will keep the wolf from the door for very long.
But then I remember the insurance papers he asked me to sign a few weeks back. When I’d penned my name without even reading what I was signing—trusting that he would always have my back.
Was that what my mother was trying to warn me about? Does she know something I don’t? Had I literally signed my life away?
I imagine Charlie seeing me on the lane up ahead, cycling along with the wind in my hair.
What had he thought as he’d rounded the bend and been presented with the opportunity to make his life easier?
Or had he been following me all the way from town, having planned my demise to the letter?
He would have known the exact moment to take me out, waiting for the perfect spot where he was able to see the road ahead, as it meandered up through the fields.
Knowing that there was no other car within half a mile, he would have feverishly looked in his rearview mirror as he got closer, to check that nothing was coming up behind him.
Sure that by the time someone came along, impact would have been made and he would have distanced himself enough for them not to recall the make or even the color of his car.
But if he’d gone to all that trouble, what had made him stop? If he hated me that much, why hadn’t he finished the job? He’d done the hard part; I was lying helpless on the road. All he had to do was put his foot down one more time and it would all have been over.
“There you go, love, all done,” says the man, oblivious to my internal conflict.
I reach out to take the keys from him, but there’s a split-second hesitation in him giving them to me.
“I don’t suppose I could use your toilet before I go, could I?”
“I’m afraid not,” I say, instinctively, not least because I don’t have the time, but because we have no water. Our supplies having been cut since late last night so that a broken pipe could be fixed just outside the village. And much to my dismay, Charlie had had me weeing into a bucket.
“It’s better to be able to throw it away than have it stagnating in the bottom of the toilet,” he’d said as he carried it into the garden to dispose of this morning.
“Righty-o,” the windscreen man says, looking confused, but knowing he has no right to question me further. “I’ll be off then. But tell your husband to avoid any more deer.…”