The Warning by Sophie Hannah Read Free Book Online Page A

needy because you’re not clingy, pushy, harrassy in the way that most needy people are. On the contrary, you never ask for anything.”
    Lorna takes a break in her assassination of my character to sip her ginger beer shandy. She slurps in her eagerness to get going again, and spills a bit out of the side of her mouth.
    “I’ve never thought about this before, but I reckon there are two types of needy,” she goes on, wiping her chin. “Active and passive. Active is . . . Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction . She’s the perfect example. Passive—or maybe covert’s a better word, or humble—is you. All other things being equal, no one would ever know you were needy, least of all yourself, because you ask for nothing and expect nothing. You go through life accepting that you’ll never be special, never be anyone’s favorite person. Why should you be, right? Little old insignificant you? You neither hope nor expect to get your needs met, so, like a dutiful parent, you feed all your energy into caring for Freya. But then, boom! Out of the blue, Tom Rigbey comes along like a bolt of lightning . . . He’s massively needy too, by the way, though he uses his wit and charm to conceal the void at his core. His good looks too—no one suspects how desperate he is because, come on, who wouldn’t be supremely confident if they looked like that?”
    Desperate. The word lodges at the center of my mind, in the bull’s-eye spot.
    Lorna’s right. Who would think about marriage so early in a relationship unless they were desperate? Not even a relationship, come to think of it. An acquaintance. Why would a man of Tom Rigbey’s caliber waste his time with me unless . . .
    Unless he’s so insecure that he’d fear abandonment if he went for a woman in the same league as him.
    “ Tom Rigbey, your knight in shining armor,” Lorna warms to her theme. “He saves the day, gets Freya’s music to the Joseph auditions in time to avoid disaster, lavishes flattery on both you and her, mentions diamonds and marriage terrifyingly quickly. At this point, any regular woman would think, ‘Yikes, a stalker!’ but not you—because, unknown to you, you’ve secretly always craved that kind of attention. To you he doesn’t seem frighteningly single-minded and obsessive—he seems pleasingly attentive! Gratifyingly keen. I notice you’re not denying it.”
    That’s because I’ve temporarily lost the power of speech.
    “You respond to his stalking by stalking him back .” Lorna couldn’t be more delighted by her own cleverness. “You make him a tiepin with musical notes inside it from a song that’s supposed to have some significance to the two of you— way over the top, as thank-you gifts go. You stay up half the night Googling him—”
    “As did you,” I point out.
    “Only because I knew you were, and I suspected you’d make a hash of it. Then you take the present to his office when you could easily have posted it. Why didn’t you? You were hoping to bump into him, that’s why. And then you let him take you out for dinner, and another dinner the next night, despite being warned about him—”
    “By a stranger!” I snap. “Would you take the word of a stranger—one who wasn’t even prepared to be direct in her accusations—and avoid someone you liked, who had only ever been nice to you?”
    Lorna pulls her face out of her pint glass and sighs. “Not nice, Chloe. Stalkerish. Please see sense. Look, think of it like this: imagine you meet a man who has this weird habit of constantly edging forward with his feet when he speaks to you. You’d find it annoying, wouldn’t you? You’re trying to talk to him but you can’t concentrate because all the time he’s shuffling closer and closer. Soon his face will be touching yours—eww! Unless . . . can you guess where I’m going with this?”
    Outer Mongolia? I should be so lucky.
    “Unless you have the equally weird habit of constantly edging backwards