_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

“I know that. But they seem to buy everything that bastard says. That
Riley woman, I can tell when she talks about him. She likes him. The
poor, downtrodden refugee.” He hangs his head, wretched. “Maybe he’s
right. We did have that awful fight. But I can’t believe . . . She wasn’t
unhappy with me. She wasn’t. She wasn’t.” When he says it the third
time, I wonder whether he’s trying to convince himself. “But if she was
having an affair, she must have been unhappy, mustn’t she?”
“Not necessarily,” I say. “Perhaps it was one of those—what do they
call it?—transference things. That’s the word they use, isn’t it? When a
patient develops feelings—or thinks they develop feelings—for a
therapist. Only the therapist is supposed to resist them, to point out that
the feelings aren’t real.”
His eyes are on my face, but I feel as though he isn’t really listening
to what I’m saying.
“What happened?” he asks. “With you. You left your husband. Was
there someone else?”
I shake my head. “Other way round. Anna happened.”
“Sorry.” He pauses.
I know what he’s going to ask, so before he can, I say, “It started
before. While we were still married. The drinking. That’s what you
wanted to know, isn’t it?”
He nods again.
“We were trying for a baby,” I say, and my voice catches. Still, after
all this time, every time I talk about it the tears come to my eyes.
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right.” He gets to his feet, goes over to the sink and pours me
a glass of water. He puts it on the table in front of me.
I clear my throat, try to be as matter-of-fact as possible. “We were
trying for a baby and it didn’t happen. I became very depressed, and I
started to drink. I was extremely difficult to live with, and Tom sought
solace elsewhere. And she was all too happy to provide it.”
“I’m really sorry, that’s awful. I know . . . I wanted to have a child.
Megan kept saying she wasn’t ready yet.” Now it’s his turn to wipe the
tears away. “It’s one of the things . . . we argued about it sometimes.”
“Was that what you were arguing about the day she left?”
He sighs, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “No,” he says,
turning away from me. “It was something else.”
EVENING