Someone to Watch Over Me by Madeleine Reiss Read Free Book Online Page A

viciously at the soft undersides of her arms.
    â€˜Come back to bed,’ he said, scared of her and the way she had become.
    â€˜I can’t sleep. I don’t know where he is.’ She tried to explain.
    â€˜Don’t you wonder where he is?’
    He didn’t answer.
    â€˜Why won’t you talk to me?’
    Damian saw his son’s pyjamas folded on his pillow and he knew he was going to start the ending for them.
    â€˜You were supposed to be watching him. Why did you let him go?’ said Damian, and Carrie knew that this was what he had been trying not to say since Charlie had gone. Despite the pain his words brought her, she also felt a kind of relief. She had been waiting for him to blame her because she believed it was what she deserved.
    â€˜I left him with you. I left him with you …’
    Damian didn’t hide his face, but looked directly at her as the tears poured from his eyes. He made a sound that was more like rage than sorrow.

Chapter Eight
    Shortly after Molly and Rupert returned from Italy, a news story captured the headlines for several weeks. A young woman who had been jogging in their local park never made it home. She was found behind some shrubbery, her throat cut, her skirt pulled over her head to cover her face, then gathered up and tied with a ribbon.
    â€˜If that happened to you,’ said Rupert, ‘I would kill myself. I don’t want you going out alone at night for a while, at least not until they get the bastard who did it.’
    Months later, Molly saw a picture in a newspaper of the so-called Ribbon Murderer. He was looking straight at the camera as he got out of the police van. He had an ordinary, quite pleasant face. The sort of face you would trust. However much you scrutinised it, the signs of what he had done weren’t there.
    What had started as a short-term solution to the potential threat posed by the murderer became a way of life for Molly. Without really noticing it, she stopped going out by herself. She became so accustomed to her life being managed by Rupert that she forgot that other people didn’t have to account for every minute of their day, the way she did. He had been so solicitous in the trammelling of her life that she had not noticed her imprisonment. First he started to ring her at work, and then more and more frequently he was outside the school gates at the end of the day, waiting for her to come out. One day he decided that the skirt she was wearing was too short, so he replaced it with two Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses. They were beautiful and they suited her, so she forgot that she had been angry that he had thrown something of hers away without asking her. He told her that she was getting too old to have un-styled hair that hung down her back like a girl and took her to an expensive salon, where a young man with sharp scissors and sharp hip bones transformed her curls into an elegant bob. The reflection of her face, with its newly framed eyes, looked strange to her. When the hairdresser moved smoothly round her with the mirror, she could see the exposed white length of her neck that had been hidden since she was a child and was reminded of the bleached bones of a prehistoric find.
    Without really noticing it, her friendships started to fade away. People got fed up of being turned down all the time or discovering that where Molly went, Rupert would inevitably be. Many of them felt envious of what they saw as the romance of her relationship. Only one or two of her closest friends questioned this all-encompassing intimacy, but when this questioning became too strident, Rupert was adept at putting doubts in her mind about their motivations.
    â€˜I think they are just jealous of our happiness, darling,’ he would say. ‘They’d give anything to have what we have.’
    They had been married for about a year and a half when Rupert suggested that she should stop taking the pill. Although in theory Molly