_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

less traumatic than the surgical one she’d had when she was at university.
I couldn’t speak to her after that, I could barely look at her. Things
became awkward in the office; people noticed.
Tom didn’t feel the way I did. It wasn’t his failure, for starters, and in
any case, he didn’t need a child like I did. He wanted to be a dad, he
really did—I’m sure he daydreamed about kicking a football around in
the garden with his son, or carrying his daughter on his shoulders in the
park. But he thought our lives could be great without children, too.
“We’re happy,” he used to say to me. “Why can’t we just go on being
happy?” He became frustrated with me. He never understood that it’s
possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.
I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then
a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around
a drunk. I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost. I liked my job, but I
didn’t have a glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest: women
are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as
mothers. I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make
me? Worthless.
I can’t blame all this for my drinking—I can’t blame my parents or
my childhood, an abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It’s my fault. I
was a drinker anyway—I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become
sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for
everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a
drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that.
I’m better now, about the children thing; I’ve got better since I’ve
been on my own. I’ve had to. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve realized
that I must come to terms with it. There are strategies, there is hope. If I
straightened myself out and sobered up, there’s a possibility that I could
adopt. And I’m not thirty-four yet—it isn’t over. I am better than I was a
few years ago, when I used to abandon my trolley and leave the
supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids; I wouldn’t
have been able to come to a park like this, to sit near the playground and
watch chubby toddlers rolling down the slide. There were times, at my
lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to
lose my mind.
Maybe I did, for a while. The day they asked me about at the police
station, I might have been mad then. Something Tom once said tipped
me over, sent me sliding. Something he wrote, rather: I read it on
Facebook that morning. It wasn’t a shock—I knew she was having a
baby, he’d told me, and I’d seen her, seen that pink blind in the nursery