_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

I still find it extraordinary that they chose to stay there, in that house,
in my house. I couldn’t believe it when he told me. I loved that house. I
was the one who insisted we buy it, despite its location. I liked being
down there on the tracks, I liked watching the trains go by, I enjoyed the
sound of them, not the scream of an inner-city express but the oldfashioned
trundling of ancient rolling stock. Tom told me, “It won’t
always be like this, they’ll eventually upgrade the line and then it will be
fast trains screaming past,” but I couldn’t believe it would ever actually
happen. I would have stayed there, I would have bought him out if I’d
had the money. I didn’t, though, and we couldn’t find a buyer at a decent
price when we divorced, so instead he said he’d buy me out and stay on
until he got the right price for it. But he never found the right buyer,
instead he moved her in, and she loved the house like I did, and they
decided to stay. She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them,
for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before.
She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes,
moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her
wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want
to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the
oven, just like Sylvia did.
I must have fallen asleep, the gin and the hot sun lulling me. I woke
with a start, scrabbling around desperately for my handbag. It was still
there. My skin was prickling, I was alive with ants, they were in my hair
and on my neck and chest and I leaped to my feet, clawing them away.
Two teenage boys, kicking a football back and forth twenty yards away,
stopped to watch, bent double with laughter.
The train stops. We are almost opposite Jess and Jason’s house, but I
can’t see across the carriage and the tracks, there are too many people in
the way. I wonder whether they are there, whether he knows, whether
he’s left, or whether he’s still living a life he’s yet to discover is a lie.
SATURDAY, JULY 13, 2013
MORNING
I know without looking at a clock that it is somewhere between seven
forty-five and eight fifteen. I know from the quality of the light, from the
sounds of the street outside my window, from the sound of Cathy