Trust Me - Sheryl Browne Page 0,10

Tom might be lonely and desperate to mend fences with his son. Jake would never be able to make himself believe his father had ever cared about his mother or him enough to want to meet him halfway, though.

‘Fine.’ Tom sighed heavily. ‘I haven’t got long myself, as it happens. I have an engagement in Pembridge this evening.’

‘Ah. With anyone interesting?’ Jake asked.

Emily didn’t miss the sarcasm. Tom clearly didn’t either. ‘Some people from the local medical committee,’ he answered with another weary sigh.

Quietly wishing that Jake would let his defences down a little for his own sake, and then realising that that was probably impossible, since Tom was still clearly unable to curb his flirtatious inclinations, Emily left them to it and went to clear her desk. She needed to book that pub meal and make a bit of an effort to get ready.

Heading back to her PC, she made sure she’d exited the patient app – God forbid she should leave anything on display for the cleaner when she came in; Fran Nateman revelled in a bit of juicy village gossip, and wasn’t best known for her discretion – then did a final check of incoming emails. A late email had pinged into Jake’s inbox, she noticed. She didn’t recognise the sender’s address – which began nja123 – but she ought to check it in case it was important. Good job Jake trusted her. Thanks to her job here, she had access to all his various accounts, along with his medical history. She really did know everything there was to know about him.

Smiling distractedly, she opened the email and her heart stopped dead.

Unless you want a certain person to find out about your extracurricular activities, meet me in the designated place, 3 p.m. tomorrow.

Three

Her hands shaking, Emily typed the address into the email search bar. No previous emails came up. Nausea swilling inside her, she tried to make sense of it. It was some kind of joke, she tried to reassure herself. It had to be. Or else it was meant for Tom rather than Jake. She seized on that as a possible explanation. Might he be having an affair? Could someone be threatening to expose him? Her palms damp with sweat, she searched through Jake’s previous emails, her gaze darting in the direction of the offices lest Jake or Tom suddenly come out. She went back weeks, finding nothing personal of any significance other than emails he had sent her. Drowning in paperwork, his last one had said. I’m going to be at least another couple of hours. Don’t worry about food. I’ll get takeaway. Sorry. Will make it up. Promise. X

She had worried. She worried constantly about him: his diet, the long hours he worked, his exhaustion. She swallowed hard, saw afresh the image from her dream of her sister’s hand pressed against the window, as if she were trying to reach out to her. She had thought Kara was taunting her, reminding her of Jake’s flirtation with another woman. She’d been angry. She’d thought her sister was jealous. In her mind, she’d been convinced that Kara was trying from the grave to take her man away, as she imagined Emily had done to her. But what if it was nothing of the sort? She recalled the frightened, plaintive look in her sister’s eyes, almost as if she were mourning. What if she was mourning not the loss of years gone, but the loss to come? Emily’s loss? What if she was trying to warn her?

Her heart racing, she reached for the gold locket she always wore with her sister’s photo inside, trying to find some comfort from it.

Could it be true? Was this the message she was supposed to take from her dream, that Jake was having an affair? She’d thought that, in frequently working so late, he was being conscientious. She’d admired him for it. When she’d missed him in the evenings, she’d reminded herself what a good man he was, determined to do right by his patients. But an affair would explain his bone-weary exhaustion when he did finally come home, wouldn’t it? His ‘extracurricular activities’ would be a terrible drain on his energies.

Had she been so wrong about him? Wrong to trust him? She’d loved her first boyfriend – or thought she had. She’d thought he’d loved her back. He hadn’t, other than in some twisted way she would never understand. But she hadn’t trusted him. Somewhere inside her, even as a