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The Marriage Trap: A completely addictive psychological thriller

Sheryl Browne
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Books by Sheryl Browne
  3. Dedication
  4. KARLA
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Twenty-Four
  29. Twenty-Five
  30. Twenty-Six
  31. Twenty-Seven
  32. Twenty-Eight
  33. Twenty-Nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-One
  36. Thirty-Two
  37. Thirty-Three
  38. Thirty-Four
  39. Thirty-Five
  40. Thirty-Six
  41. Thirty-Seven
  42. Thirty-Eight
  43. Thirty-Nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-One
  46. Forty-Two
  47. Forty-Three
  48. Forty-Four
  49. Forty-Five
  50. Forty-Six
  51. Forty-Seven
  52. Forty-Eight
  53. Epilogue
  54. The Affair
  55. Hear more from Sheryl
  56. Books by Sheryl Browne
  57. A Letter from Sheryl
  58. The Babysitter
  59. The Second Wife
  60. Acknowledgements

Cover

Books by Sheryl Browne

The Babysitter

The Affair

The Second Wife

The Marriage Trap

AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

The Babysitter (Available in the UK and the US)

The Affair (Available in the UK and the US)

The Second Wife (Available in the UK and the US)

Dedication

To Drew for his inspiration – and my family and friends for their fabulous support.

KARLA

I AM FALLING

Her stillness is disconcerting for him. It’s distracting him from this – this thing he’s been planning to do for weeks. Jason isn’t able to meet her eyes – too cowardly to see the bewilderment there, the pain. Two or three times, she sees his worried gaze stray to where she stands silently in the doorway, watching this final chapter in her marriage play out like a scene in a soap opera. This would be the calm before the storm, the prequel to tragedy, where the avid viewer, who knows this wronged woman’s humiliation, her indescribable hurt, waits for her to plunge the long knife deep between his shoulder blades, as he stuffs his shirts into his suitcase.

They’re not ironed, the shirts. She stopped doing that some while ago.

She will snarl contemptuously down at him, a combination of disgust and deep satisfaction in her eyes, as he crumples, a pool of his own blood flowering beneath him, disbelief flickering briefly in his deceitful, dark eyes, before the light fades.

This woman who stands here silently does none of that. She is detached, unreactive. This woman is me. I don’t know her any more. The tablets supplied by my doctor – mild sedatives, that’s all – for the endless nights when my mind can’t find solace in sleep, they numb me, allow me, through the wooziness, to view things with clarity. I can’t stop him leaving. My silence, this time, is not tactical, a ploy to manipulate him into backing down after an argument. There’s nothing to say. No words left. No words that can keep him. No more accusations to scream, no tears I can cry that won’t fall on barren ground. Jason has made up his mind. Even as I see his determined stride falter under the weight of his guilt, as he walks away from the dressing table with random handfuls of clothes, I know he won’t be dissuaded. He will go to her: Jessie. Jezebel. The woman who is apparently everything I am not.

Jason hesitates, glancing around the room for anything he might have forgotten – small things, obviously. No doubt he will come back for ‘the rest’, whatever the rest may be. Material evidence of our time spent together. He will take what he perceives to be his, leaving me with the physical evidence, the scars on my heart, my mind. On my body from bearing his children, the children he will abandon. For her.