Don't Let Him In

by Lisa Jewell

But also, the home of a man who made one really bad mistake that his wife and his family are going to pay for, over and over again.

He was fifty-four. He was killed by a stranger. Pushed onto the tracks. Under a train.

Buying a car was easy enough to do. Paying for it is a problem I will have to deal with later. You might think it’s stressful living as I do, from one credit card to the next, one lie to the next, but it really isn’t. I’m not like other people, you see.

But first I have to work out what to do about my wife. And before that, I need to work out how the hell I’m going to find the money to pay for this stupid fucking car.

“Darling,” I say in that voice I use when I’m with her: clipped, elegant, private school, not the soft, swollen, northern lilt I use when I’m with Martha. “I

I feel my breathing steady. I am Jonathan Truscott again.

The whole apartment smells of dead marriages and lonely nights and adult children who never visit.

This man who steals women’s money and abandons children and follows women on the street for kicks, this man who lies and finagles and uses people, this man has been in her kitchen cooking food with her dead father’s kitchen utensils, and for a moment Ash is subsumed by so much violent rage that her vision turns purple.