_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

once suspecting that there was no meeting, that all the while he was in a
coffee shop in Ashbury with his ex-wife.
This is what I’m thinking about while I’m unloading the dishwasher,
with great care and precision, because Evie is napping and the clatter of
cutlery against crockery might wake her up. He does fool me. I know
he’s not always 100 percent honest about everything. I think about that
story about his parents—how he invited them to the wedding but they
refused to come because they were so angry with him for leaving Rachel.
I always thought that was odd, because on the two occasions when I’ve
spoken to his mum she sounded so pleased to be talking to me. She was
kind, interested in me, in Evie.
“I do hope we’ll be able to see her soon,” she said, but when I told
Tom about it he dismissed it.
“She’s trying to get me to invite them round,” he said, “just so she can
refuse. Power games.” She didn’t sound like a woman playing power
games to me, but I didn’t press the point. The workings of other people’s
families are always so impenetrable. He’ll have his reasons for keeping
them at arm’s length, I know he will, and they’ll be centred on protecting
me and Evie.
So why am I wondering now whether that was true? It’s this house,
this situation, all the things that have been going on here—they’re
making me doubt myself, doubt us. If I’m not careful they’ll end up
making me crazy, and I’ll end up like her. Like Rachel.
I’m just sitting here, waiting to take the sheets out of the tumble dryer.
I think about turning on the television and seeing if there’s an episode of
Friends on that I haven’t watched three hundred times, I think about
doing my yoga stretches, and I think about the novel on my bedside
table, which I’ve read twelve pages of in the past two weeks. I think
about Tom’s laptop, which is on the coffee table in the living room.
And then I do the things I never thought I would. I grab the bottle of
red that we opened last night with dinner and I pour myself a glass. Then
I fetch his laptop, power it up and start trying to guess the password.
I’m doing the things she did: drinking alone and snooping on him.
The things she did and he hated. But recently—as recently as this
morning—things have shifted. If he’s going to lie, then I’m going to
check up on him. That’s a fair deal, isn’t it? I feel I’m owed a bit of
fairness. So I try to crack the password. I try names in different
combinations: mine and his, his and Evie’s, mine and Evie’s, all three of
us together, forwards and backwards. Our birthdays, in various
combinations. Anniversaries: the first time we saw each other, the first