The Accident: The bestselling psychological thriller by C.L. Taylor

Author:C.L. Taylor [Taylor, C.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-09T22:00:00+00:00

Thursday 31st May 1991

It’s been nearly two months now since James and I split up and, despite Hels telling me that time is a healer, I feel worse now than I did the day we split up.

I spoke to Hels the morning after and told her what had happened. She gasped when I told her about James holding me against the wall and said that, if she ever heard me make excuses or blame myself for James’s behaviour again, she’d never speak to me again. Then she ordered me to report him to the police. I know she was just worried about me but her comment annoyed me. James wasn’t a criminal. He was drunk and scared I’d slept with someone else. Yes, he’d lost his temper and got a bit rough but he didn’t actually hit me.

I didn’t tell Hels the real reason I was refusing to go to the police – I was secretly hoping that, by the end of the day, James would be on my doorstep with a bunch of red roses and an apology. He didn’t. He didn’t ring either. And I drank and smoked myself to sleep for a second night.

I saw a lot of Hels and Rupert those first few weeks after James and I split up. One of them would ring at least once a day and they’d take me out – to the cinema, the pub, their house for a meal – two or three times a week. I’m not sure when, or why, we started to drift apart again. Maybe it was after their holiday in Greece, maybe it was when Rupert had to put in a lot of overtime at work or maybe it was because I’d stopped bursting into tears each time James’s name was mentioned and they assumed I was over him. Either way, I stopped going out as much and that’s when the rot really set in. I’d lie in bed at night, poring over the details of my relationship with James – trying to work out when it had all gone wrong, trying to pinpoint the moment the magic disappeared. I was haunted by guilt and regret – if I hadn’t opened up to him about my sex life on our second date he’d have carried on thinking that I was a precious angel, if I hadn’t told him about Rupert maybe the four of us would have been the best of friends, if I’d dragged him out of the pub a couple of hours earlier maybe his mum wouldn’t hate my guts. I wanted to rewind time – to go back and do everything again differently. Maybe that way I wouldn’t feel like I’d lost the love of my life.

The more I thought, the more miserable I became and the more I drank. I’d sit by my phone, repeatedly snatching it up to check it was still working or repeatedly dialling James’s number. The first few times I called his mum answered and told me that James wasn’t at home.

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