Free Until You're Mine by Samantha Hayes Page A

swallowed it away. Now wasn’t the time.
    ‘Craven Road Campus?’ Lorraine asked.
    The woman nodded. It was the place where her husband both worked and played away, except she didn’t know it.
We have something in common, you and me,
Lorraine wanted to say, but didn’t.
    Brief . . . meaningless . . . over . . . 
Adam had gone on to tell her he’d been stupid, drunk, that he was having a crisis, that she’d pursued him and it wasn’t his fault. What advice would she give the younger woman, Lorraine wondered? Get out while you can? Do the same back? Take him to the cleaners? While the house looked pleasant enough, it was clear Liam Rider wasn’t exactly cleaning-out material. Neither was Adam, though that hadn’t stopped her fantasising about it.
    ‘If he comes home before I’ve spoken to him, will you ask him to call me?’ Lorraine handed the woman a card. ‘It’s urgent.’
    ‘He’s not in any trouble, is he?’ She shooed the children back as they approached the door.
    ‘No. I just need him to help with some enquiries.’ Lorraine smiled tersely before leaving for the college.
    *
    ‘You know the first thing he said?’ Lorraine was perched on a bar stool in the kitchen. Once the girls were sorted for the evening, she was back to the office.
    Adam shook his head.
    ‘You won’t tell my wife, will you?’
    Adam pulled a face. He hadn’t been present at the interview. ‘Natural.’
    He’d just come in from his run and was dripping with sweat even though a frost had begun to creep across the pavements and railings. He wiped his face on the tea towel. Lorraine snatched it and tossed it through the door to the utility room. ‘That’s a disgusting thing to do,’ she said. ‘On both counts.’
    She couldn’t help the occasional comment. It hadn’t quite been a year. Mostly, she was able to cope, to put it behind her, get on with life. Then there were the times she couldn’t and all she wanted to do was make the rest of Adam’s life as unbearable as possible.
    ‘What else did Rider have to say?’ Adam bit into an apple. ‘Did he agree to a DNA test?’
    ‘He’d heard about Sally-Ann on the news so he’d had a couple of days to absorb the shock. He was still very upset though. It wasn’t a great way to find out. He said she was a promising student, trying to make something of herself by taking a course, blah blah.’ She took a breath. Now wasn’t the time. ‘And yes, he agreed to give a swab straight away.’
    Adam pulled off his luminous running top and tossed that onto the utility-room floor with the tea towel. ‘Has the time of death come through yet?’ he asked.
    ‘I spoke to the pathologist. Best guess is she’d been dead a minimum of thirty-eight hours and a maximum of forty-one. Rider told me without being asked that he could prove his exact whereabouts for the last week. That’s when he virtually begged me not to tell his wife. “It would kill her” I think were his words.’
    Lorraine bit her cheek. Adam didn’t look in the least bit uncomfortable.
    ‘Rider had ended it with Sally-Ann several months ago, when she insisted the baby was his. She wanted money from him and he didn’t have it to give. And of course he didn’t want his wife to know about the affair or the baby. He took a risk, if you ask me, by dumping her, said that if it all came out, he was just going to deny it.’ Lorraine stood up and leant against the worktop. She felt her heart kick up. ‘Do you know what else he told me?’ She paused. ‘He told me that unless you actually get caught in the act, no one can prove a thing.’ Lorraine had wanted to slap him at that point.
    ‘I’ll remember that then,’ Adam said sourly, and went upstairs for a shower.

9
    THE WORST THING about not being pregnant is that everything in life seems to suddenly involve babies. And the worst thing about having to make up so many stories, literally living in the centre of an ever-changing lie, is that the stories