Enemy at the Window by AJ Waines

Author:AJ Waines [Waines, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books

Chapter 38

Annie, the nurse, showed him through to the far corner of the dayroom where Sophie was already seated.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ he said.

‘This better be good.’

Sophie sounded formal, as though welcoming him to a job interview. Between Sophie now and the Sophie he’d married, lay a huge divide. A plunging, black chasm he didn’t understand and had no desire to peer into.

Daniel took a seat beside her. Annie stood beside them, her hands clasped in front of her and her legs spread apart, like a sentry.

‘I think you’ll want to take a look at these.’

Daniel laid out the pictures he’d printed from his phone in front of her on the coffee table. He’d spent an hour and a half at reception, trying to get the right person to understand how imperative it was that Sophie got to see them. In the end, the duty psychiatrist would only let Daniel show them to her if Annie was glued to his hip. ‘In case it upsets her,’ she’d said.

He gave Annie a hard stare in the hope that she might back off a little, but she didn’t shift an inch.

Daniel put the first picture in Sophie’s hand. ‘Look, this is us. Me, holding you close with my arm around you, leaving Desmond’s newsagents in Highgate. We were on our way to one of those guided walks at the cemetery. You remember?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘What is this for, Daniel? To remind me how in love we once were – before you cheated on me?’

‘Now, look at this one. Spot the difference?’

For a surreal moment, Daniel felt like a detective, slapping crime scene shots before a suspect and demanding answers. This shot showed the same pose, but with the altered backdrop – the hotel – and the woman he’d never met in the space beside Daniel. Sophie gasped and a shudder gripped her shoulders.

‘This is one of the pictures sent to my office!’ she cried.

‘You’ve seen it before?’

She scrabbled through the pile on the table. ‘Yes – all of these. They’re the same photos. You remember? The ones that had disappeared from my bag by the time I’d got home from work.’ She gritted her teeth. ‘You didn’t believe me!’

It’s true. He hadn’t believed her. With nothing concrete to show him all along, he’d concluded that everything about the so-called affair was inside her head.

Annie peered over at the pictures, then looked away nonchalantly when Daniel caught her at it.

‘Well. They’re very clever,’ he said, ‘but they’re not real. They’ve been digitally altered.’

‘These are fake?’ she cried. ‘This isn’t… these aren’t how it was?’ She lifted each photo close to her face, then compared them with others that looked similar, but which had various alterations. He watched the realisation twist her features with each image.

‘Oh, my God… I see what you mean.’

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Annie shuffling closer, but she kept quiet.

‘They look completely genuine until you see them altogether,’ said Daniel.

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