While You Sleep: A chilling, unputdownable psychological thriller that will send shivers up your spine!. Stephanie Merritt
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and an old cashmere jumper of Dan’s, and padded down to find the kitchen. It was a large, wide room at the back of the house, facing the shore, with a door that led out to the veranda; a proper old farmhouse kitchen, tastefully modernised, with a stone floor and walls painted in a muted slate-blue and cream. She opened and closed a few wooden cupboards. All the appliances and cookware were branded, the kind of names that would meet with the approval of the well-heeled guests they obviously hoped to attract. Zoe filled the kettle, found a cafetière and an unopened packet of filter coffee and considered again, while it was brewing, how strange it was that Mick and Kaye should have gone to so much trouble and expense to restore this house so beautifully and leave it to strangers, while they went on living above the pub. A five-mile drive to work would be nothing, for the joy of waking up to this view every morning. Perhaps they were counting on the income as an investment; she supposed the pub trade must suffer out of season. Perhaps – and she pushed this thought to a corner of her mind – they did not want to risk being cut off in winter.
The kitchen door was firmly locked and bolted from the inside, the keys hanging on a hook behind it, as Mick had said. All the windows were closed and secured, she noticed, with window locks; there was no chance that anyone could really have entered the house last night. Tired brain, she reproached herself, sliding back the bolts. She poured her coffee into a large pottery mug and stepped outside with it into a warm wash of golden, late-autumn sunshine. The boards of the veranda felt damp under her bare feet and though the air carried the sharp, clean edge of October, the light was gentle, caressing her face. She wrapped her hands around the steaming mug and took in her new home for the first time.
The sea had retreated, leaving a corrugated expanse of tawny sand, scattered with pebbles and ribbons of kelp. The wind of the previous night had dropped and in the curve of her little bay the water shone like mercury under the light, calm now and docile, lapping in slow rhythmic waves at the shore. Above it, scalloped rows of white clouds drifted across an expanse of blue, rinsed clean and bright. Seabirds wheeled overhead, banking sharply or floating on invisible streams, complaining to one another. Zoe walked to the end of the veranda, to the corner where it joined the north side of the house, and tilted her face to the sun, breathing in salt, damp earth, fresh coffee as she absorbed the colours of the bay – violet and gold, azure, emerald and indigo – picturing how she would mix those colours in her palette, how thickly they could be layered to recreate the textures of sea, rock, cloud. She sensed the old quickening in her gut at the prospect of creating something from nothing, the days stretching ahead, blank canvases, no demands on her except the paintings themselves, their own forms. Was this freedom, then? Was this it – the freedom she had secretly craved over the past decade: no husband, no child, only herself alone with an empty canvas and a view of the wild sea? She allowed her gaze to sweep around the deserted beach. The answer, of course, was no. This was not true freedom, not the freedom of her youth, because implicit in their absence was her own dereliction – of her responsibilities, of the ties that should have anchored her. There could be no freedom now that was not tainted with guilt.
‘I hope you find what you’re looking for.’ The last words Dan had said to her before she left, in a voice tight with anger, making clear that nothing she might gain from this decision would ever outweigh the price she was asking everyone else to pay. Leaning against the wall in the hallway, arms folded across his chest, as the cab driver rang the buzzer. Watching as she tried to wrestle her cases down the stairs, not offering to help, in case she should mistake that for approval or acquiescence; determined to the very end that she should not imagine, even for a second, that she had his blessing.
‘The fuck?’ he had said, the night she had announced her project over dinner. So she had repeated it, clearly, patiently, but he had continued to stare at her, knife and fork poised in mid-air.
‘So you went ahead and planned all this without even asking me?’ he said, when he had eventually processed it.
‘Like you went ahead and decided to quit your job without discussing it,’ she replied, evenly.
‘What – you can’t even compare—’ He put the cutlery down, ran both hands through his hair, clutching at clumps of it. ‘There was nothing to discuss – it was a good offer. Better than I expected. Architects are the first to suffer in a downturn, you know that. The whole construction industry’s feeling it. Guys are being laid off all over. I had to take that deal before I was left with no choice. I did it so I could be around for you more. It was the opposite of fucking running away.’
Zoe said nothing; it was easier to let Dan go on believing himself to be right. How could she explain it to him? The last decade had not diminished him, as it had her. He had not had to give up his place in the world since becoming a parent; he still put on a good suit and set out to work every day, solved problems, engaged his intellect, kept his skills sharp. He spent several evenings a week dining with clients and associates, occasionally taking her along when they could find a sitter, but mostly not; he continued to travel frequently for contracts and conferences, sometimes to Europe, more often across the country to consult on projects with the Seattle office. She had not failed to notice that meetings were often arranged there for Monday mornings, obliging him to stay the weekend; she had noticed too that his first point of contact in Seattle was a colleague called Lauren Carrera, a woman who appeared to have no concept of time zones and would call him on his cell with supposedly urgent queries long past midnight, calls he would retreat downstairs to take in his office, his voice soft and light, full of easy laughter, the way she had not heard it in a long time. Lauren Carrera was in her early thirties and too exhibitionist to set her Facebook photos to private; in all of them she was skiing or surfing or running half-marathons for charity, or raising tequila shots with a vast and diverse group of friends. Zoe had never asked Dan outright if he had slept with Lauren Carrera, because he was no good at lying and she didn’t want to have to watch him try.
Dan’s life was compartmentalised, in the way that was permitted to men; home, fatherhood, was only a part of it. It had always been assumed that she would stay home once Caleb was born, and she had felt in no position to argue; it was not as if she earned enough from her paintings to support a family – though one day she might have done, if she had been allowed to try. She would never know now, what her early promise might have flowered into. ‘You can always paint while the baby’s asleep,’ Dan had said cheerfully, knotting his tie in the mirror after five brief days of paternity leave, unwittingly revealing with those few words how he regarded her work. A small chip of ice had embedded itself in the heart of their marriage, though as usual she had said nothing. For the best part of a decade she had been disappearing, her life shrunk to a cycle of bake sales and swim team practice, as the ice spread slowly outwards from the centre. In recent years she had found herself growing panicky, all her thoughts swarming relentlessly back to the same, unanswered question: Is this it? In her darkest moments, she sometimes wondered if she was now being punished for her ingratitude, her inability to be content.
‘How will this help?’ Dan had persisted, the night she had told him about the island. ‘I’ve said over and over we should go back to counselling, but you just want to run away from everything, like some adolescent?’
‘We tried counselling. It didn’t work.’
‘It’s not fucking magic.’ He pulled at his hair. ‘You have to stick at it. Jesus, Zo …’ The anger subsided into weary despair: ‘We can’t go on like this. You know that.’
‘I need some time by myself.’
‘That’s not how marriage works. You don’t get to take a break for a bit when it gets difficult – you do it together. That’s what I always believed, anyway. What does Dr Schlesinger have to say about your big plan, huh?’
She didn’t tell him that she had stopped seeing Dr Schlesinger weeks ago; the suggestion that she was expected to seek permission for her decisions needled her.
‘It’s only a month,’ she had replied instead, surprised by how calm she sounded. ‘I’ll be back before Thanksgiving.’ It was easier to let him believe that too.
He changed tack. ‘How are you paying for this?’
‘I saved.’
‘Oh,