Gaslight: Who can you trust when you can't trust yourself?

GASLIGHT JE ROWNEY Also by this author Psychological Thrillers I Can’t Sleep Other People’s Lives Domestic Suspense The Woman in the Woods The Book Swap For updates, information about future releases and a free book, visit http://jerowney.com/about-je-rowney This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. © JE Rowney and Little Fox Publishing, 2023 ONE There are only two explanations for what has been happening. Either he is trying to make me think I’m crazy or he’s trying to kill me. The one thing I know for sure is that I need to get out of this house. After everything that happened here, I should never have come back. I let him talk me into it. I gave up so easily, and for what? I got myself into this and now, I either get myself out of it or I find out which of the explanations is correct. TWO It all started the day I found out that my dad died. Like any momentous life experience, I remember exactly where I was when I got the call. Mainly because I missed it. I was sitting cross-legged on the lino-floored kitchen area in my crappy studio flat. The kitchenette was barely big enough for me to turn around in, but there I was, head in the cupboard under the sink, butt up against the wall, listening to my phone ringing out in my pocket. Every couple of days the drain would do this thing where the pipe between the sink and wherever the water went decided to loosen and let the grey water spray from the sides of the connection rather than allowing it to go on its way without trashing the inside of the under-sink cupboard. The plumbing was my landlord’s responsibility, according to the template tenancy agreement that he had ripped from the internet, and I had signed up to when I moved in three months previously. Keeping the flat from getting wrecked was on me though, so even though I was waiting for him to send a plumber, or more likely to come over and botch the job himself, in the meantime I had to clean up the mess. DIY was not my strong point, but being a woman in her twenties, living alone, I’d learned how to use Google searches and YouTube tutorials to help me through it. The landlord was useless, and the salary of an agency admin worker was around exactly what you would think it was - peanuts. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t poor poor, but I was only a couple of unplanned bills away from there. Do It Yourself was my mantra, not my hobby. Agency work is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. What I was getting was a steady flow of placements and a steady, low wage. My phone chirped in the back pocket of my jeans while my yellow washing up gloves were wrangling with what an image I found on Google called the trap. It sounded dramatic, but really it turned out to be the name for a plastic U-shaped loop. It was the third, or was it the fourth, time that I’d gone through the motions with the trap and the slip-nuts (a name more amusing and definitely not as dramatic). Whatever I was doing was only ever going to be effective to a point, but it was the middle of the month, and my pay cheque wasn’t due for another sixteen days. You can bet your life I was counting. I heard the beep as I let the call go to answerphone. Whoever it was could wait. Best-case scenario, it was the landlord, saying he was on the way with his band of merry plumbers. Worst-case scenario, it was the job I had lined up for the following week calling to cancel. Or, of course, it could have been Dan. Even though we’d been messing around together for a few months by then, he wasn’t my first thought when my phone rang. I guess we were dating, but if anyone had asked me then whether he was my boyfriend I would probably have said no. If we were a couple, he would have been there fixing my drain for me, wouldn’t he? That’s the kind of romance I like, and the kind of independent young woman I am. Don’t judge me. It seems strange to think of that now: that we weren’t officially a couple when I got the call that changed everything. Looking back, I can see how rushed everything was from that day on. It didn’t feel like that at the time, though. Or maybe my situation was so crappy that I was looking for an out, any out. By the time I was wiping around the inside of the cupboard and peeling the gloves off my red hands, I had almost forgotten about the call. I pushed my knuckles onto the floor to get to my feet and felt the rub of my phone against my butt as I stood. I needed a shower. Even though I’d managed to screw the relevant parts of the pipework without getting soaked — I was learning more on each attempt — I felt dirty. It was only dishwater, and as a ready-meals-for-one type of person, the food waste content was pretty low. There was a certain smell to the under-sink cupboard, though, and I could feel it seeping into my skin. I needed a shower more than I needed to return the call from - I looked at the phone’s screen to check - Unknown Caller. Ah, Unknown Caller. One of my best friends. I never answered the phone to anyone if I didn’t know who they were, so even if I hadn’t been muddling through the sink maintenance, dear Unknown Caller