Run

by Blake Crouch

Jack could hear in her voice that she didn’t mean it. Just trying to push whatever button she thought he’d left unguarded. Under different circumstances, it would’ve pissed him off, but not tonight.

He’d been sleeping in the guestroom the last two months.

That cheating cnt made HIM sleep in the guestroom?!

“I want you to be a fucking man.

Like the man ive been cheating on you with...

The chainsaw motor seemed inappropriate at this hour. Like screams in a church.

Nothing before this cabin mattered anymore, only the given day,

Tired and strangely satisfied with the soreness in his body.

I could’ve died never knowing and you took that from me.”

This cheating cnt is judging HIM?

“Yeah, that was such a comfort as our marriage imploded.”

picked a David Morrell thriller,

Not feel it in the pit of her soul.

Sure, since she was so committed and loyal, surely there is also a spiritual connection...

Pulling the trigger, though, was another thing.

For three minutes, Mathias screamed louder than he had all day, and then at last, went silent.

Even from sixty yards away, she could see that the crossbeams which held him were still standing and that in fact her imagination had failed to concoct anything as remotely evil as what they had actually done to the man.

Jack started to say something. Stopped himself. It would’ve meant nothing, changed nothing, been solely for his benefit. No words to put this right.

This is what he saw, what he sensed on some primal frequency, when he looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time on a fall day in the American west that was so perfect it would always break his heart to think of it.

Wet pleadings plastered all over the sidewalk.