_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

“But you came to the house. Megan hardly ever invites people round.
She’s really private, protective of her own space.”
I’m searching for a reason. I wish I had never told him I’d been to the
house.
“I just came round to borrow a book.”
“Really?” He doesn’t believe me. She’s not a reader. I think of the
house—there were no books on the shelves there. “What sort of things
did she say? About me?”
“Well, she was very happy,” I say. “With you, I mean. Your
relationship.” As I’m saying this I realize how odd it sounds, but I can’t
be specific, and so I try to save myself. “To be honest with you, I was
having a really hard time in my marriage, so I think it was a kind of
compare-and-contrast thing. She lit up when she spoke about you.” What
an awful cliché.
“Did she?” He doesn’t seem to notice, there’s a note of wistfulness in
his voice. “That’s so good to hear.” He pauses, and I can hear his
breathing, quick and shallow, on the other end of the line. “We had . . .
we had a terrible argument,” he says. “The night she left. I hate the idea
that she was angry with me when . . .” He tails off.
“I’m sure she wasn’t angry with you for long,” I say. “Couples fight.
Couples fight all the time.”
“But this was bad, it was terrible, and I can’t . . . I feel like I can’t tell
anyone, because if I did they would look at me like I was guilty.”
There’s a different quality to his voice now: haunted, saturated with
guilt.
“I don’t remember how it started,” he says, and immediately I don’t
believe him, but then I think about all the arguments I’ve forgotten and I
bite my tongue. “It got very heated. I was very . . . I was unkind to her. I
was a bastard. A complete bastard. She was upset. She went upstairs and
put some things in a bag. I don’t know what exactly, but I noticed later
that her toothbrush was gone, so I knew she wasn’t planning on coming
home. I assumed . . . I thought she must have gone to Tara’s for the
night. That happened once before. Just one time. It wasn’t like this
happened all the time.
“I didn’t even go after her,” he says, and it hits me yet again that he’s
not really talking to me, he’s confessing. He’s on one side of the
confessional and I’m on the other, faceless, unseen. “I just let her go.”
“That was on Saturday night?”
“Yes. That was the last time I saw her.”