Our Little Secret: a gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist from bestselling author Darren O’Sullivan
might look like it could be a prop in a cheap horror movie or something found hanging in a butcher’s window. He wouldn’t look like anything that was once human and therefore he wouldn’t look like anything that could ruin someone’s life.
He realized that now the rules had changed. He realized that leaving a human form didn’t matter. He had done everything he could to protect other people. He had lied and hidden. He had grieved alone because it kept others safe. So focused on that, he’d almost failed to see the only thing that truly mattered. Julia. It would be a stranger who would find him, the police probably. Fuck them, they were not his responsibility. It had to be this date.
Realizing he didn’t need to care so much for someone else made Chris feel anticipation build and course through his body. Like an athlete might feel on a starting block, waiting for the gun to go. His plan hadn’t been executed the way he wanted but he was still going to join his wife. Opening his cutlery drawer Chris took out a small fruit knife, its blade about three inches and sharp. Perfect.
Looking around, he wondered where it would be best to do it. Only one place sprang to mind. The bedroom. The room where they’d shared their deepest fears and wildest dreams. The place where they could forget about the world, wrapping themselves up in their own little bubble, where they could laugh and love and lust for one another.
He went to his bedroom, sat on the edge of his bed and opened his side drawer. There were only two items in it: a book, one of its pages folded a third of the way through, which he’d not picked up in a long time, and under it Julia’s favourite light blue cardigan. He needed to be close to her as he took his last few breaths, to smell her smell, to have her with him. Although he didn’t deserve it.
The rest of her possessions were all boxed up in the small room that used to be an office. He wanted to hold her cardigan as he died. Clutching it, Chris pressed the knife into his wrist. It wasn’t ideal. Far from it. He knew that it would take between ten and fifteen minutes to bleed out and in that time most of his blood would cover the room that he and Julia slept in.
It was completely opposite to what he had tried and failed to achieve with the train. It would be messy; it would be disturbing for the poor person who found his cold lifeless body in an ocean of dark brown drying blood. But he would be by her side once more and in that ten to fifteen minutes as his life faded, he could think of her. Taking a deep breath, he glanced at the small digital clock as the flicking of one minute to the next caught his eye. The time it read stopped him before he spilt a single drop of blood.
11.54 p.m. – Kings Road, Cambridge
I spent the journey watching the scenery rush past, unable to focus on what my vision took in as a heat burnt through my body. My blood pumped through my veins like lava, making my eyes sting. My breathing was shallow and tight. I was obviously in shock. The train went into a tunnel, making me jump and as my ears popped I caught myself in the glass that acted like a mirror against the vast black nothingness. The girl who looked back was blotchy and pale. Her mascara, which was designed to be waterproof, had failed after twenty minutes of crying.
I couldn’t keep looking at myself as a fresh tear rolled out of the corner of my left eye. Instead I focused on my hands, the polish on my fingernails chipped through picking. My hands shook slightly. I pressed them onto my thighs to try and calm them. It seemed to work. I tensed my arms, pressing down onto my legs and took a deep breath in. As I released my tension I let my breath out and, for a moment, I felt in control of my thoughts again.
Somehow, I felt like I had failed when in fact I had done the exact opposite. I should have felt empowered. I had just saved a life – and yet, I felt like a child, lost, needy. I tried to look at myself again, but as I did the tunnel ended and the flat, dark world came into focus again, broken only by lights from farmhouses and faraway villages until the city lights of Cambridge came closer.
Wrapping my cardigan around me tightly I saw couples sat in front of the television in the houses that lined the tracks as the train slowed into the city station. It bothered me less than I thought to see people happy together. I guess stopping a man from killing himself can change someone’s perspective.
Once I left the near-deserted station I wrapped my cardigan as tightly as I could around me and, crossing my arms, focused on keeping my breath under control. I began to walk home. Night was clinging fast to everything around me as I wandered down Station Road, making me involuntarily shiver. Shadows from street lamps transformed the Georgian student-filled town houses that were, by daylight, beautiful to look at into something more sinister. Usually if I was out this late I wanted to get home as quickly and as safely as I could, but not tonight. Tonight, I dragged my feet.
Although Cambridge on the whole was a safe city, it had its fair share of problems and streets you had to avoid after dark, like all cities do, and usually I would feel my senses heightened. Waiting for a noise or light that would make me break into a run. Somehow though, I feared the night less. Almost like my self-preservation had been detached. The gravity of walking out on the man I loved and hated simultaneously only to accidentally walk into the life of another man who was trying to kill himself was all a little too much for me to fully absorb. It seemed too bizarre for my small and ordinary life. It felt like I was watching a black and white movie instead of actually experiencing it first hand.
As I reached the botanical gardens I thought it was safe to relax a little, but as soon as I did an image flashed into my mind, like a lightning bolt illuminating a night sky. It was him, on the platform, jumping under the train as I helplessly stood by. So sudden and violent was the image, conjured up from my broken imagination, it forced the air from my lungs and stopped me in my tracks.
I had to sit down or I was going to black out. I tried to refocus on my breathing but it was too late. Flashing through my mind was Chris and his wet shirt and his note and his sad, fearful eyes that made my heart ache. They were spinning inside my head, shouting at me. Taking my last cigarette out of the packet I tried to light it. My unsteady hands making it impossible to do so. Each strike of the flint failing to spark the gas somehow pressed on my chest, crushing my lungs, until I had to stop and lower my head between my legs. The lack of oxygen getting in made me feel as if I was going to black out. I felt as if I was drowning, as if I wasn’t a part of the world.
When I closed my eyes, I saw his bare feet on the platform floor and heard his voice saying it connected him. Without thinking I unzipped my calf-high boots and struggled to get them off my feet before taking my socks off as well. My fumbling fingers felt like they didn’t belong to me anymore and I knew if I didn’t get control I was going to be sick. Hot bile began to rise from my stomach and my eyes were struggling to focus as I finally wrestled my socks off.
As soon as I managed to put my feet on the cold, wet, hard, uneven floor I could feel the world begin to slow down and for a moment I focused on the uneven chips and cracks under my cooling soles. It allowed me to get my breathing under control.
After a few minutes, I could feel the blood returning to my hands, enough for me to light my cigarette, inhale a deep lungful, and lift my head back up to hear the sound of the wind in the trees and rain hitting the leaves above me. I knew I should get back up and get home to safety. But I couldn’t. I needed to stay put and finish my cigarette barefoot.
Only eighteen hours earlier, I had woken up to just another Wednesday with its mediocrity of responding to emails and taking telephone calls. Only the nervous sensation of seeing John later and what that would bring letting me know I wasn’t entirely numb. Fast-forward that short time and everything had changed because of a man called Chris Hayes.
I saw him kiss that picture again. But in my mind, I was stood behind myself watching the whole evening play out in front of me. Like you would in a dream, and my heart ached once more. The poor, poor man. Why didn’t he just do it? Was it something he had to do alone or something more? I imagined his sad eyes on mine as he fell backwards in front of the train, the sound of it hitting him, and the way his body would explode on impact, it all happening so fast it would be like he wasn’t even there. It would have been something that would have stayed