The Passengers(68)

‘No,’ Fiona replied, followed by dismissals from Libby and Matthew. ‘Then the tally so far stands at Claire with one vote and Sam with one vote.’ Fiona added Sam’s name on her tablet. ‘There are four votes left and two Passengers. Who’s next?’





Chapter 47





SAM COLE


It was her. It was Heidi all along. Your wife – the woman you love – has been making your life a living hell.

Sam’s mind raced in all directions, like someone had ignited a pile of fireworks inside his head. During the many sleepless nights he’d endured over the last few weeks, he had dissected each person in his life to figure out if one of them could be his blackmailer. However, he hadn’t been able to settle upon a name or a reason. The last person he expected to be the culprit was one of his two wives.

He stopped listening to the jury debate whether to save his life and failed to register that he had received a vote of support. Instead, he was consumed by pinpointing the moment Heidi might have discovered his double life. How had he slipped up? What had she learned? Had it all begun with a name?

‘Who on earth is Josie?’ he recalled Heidi asking one evening. On the other end of the phone, Sam’s stomach dropped forty flights.

‘No idea, why?’

‘Because you just called me Josie.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did. You said, “I’ll be home around eight-ish, Josie.”’

‘It’s the bad reception. I said around eight-ish honey.’

‘Honey? When did that become a thing?’

It hadn’t, at least not with Heidi. It was a name he used with his other wife. ‘I’m trialling it,’ he bluffed. ‘You call me babe, so I’m giving honey its day in court.’

‘Overruled. And why are you whispering?’

‘I’m still on-site as there’s a problem with removing an old staircase; I have us all working overtime.’

‘Okay, well, don’t be there too late tomorrow night. It’d be nice if you could come home and stay awake for more than ten minutes … honey.’ Heidi chuckled as she hung up.

Sam replaced his phone inside the pocket of his jeans, slipped a padded oven glove over his hand and punched the kitchen wall three times. ‘Shit!’ he mouthed. How could he have made such a careless mistake?

‘Why are you angry at the wall, Daddy?’ came a voice from the doorway. He turned to see his son, James.

‘I’m not, mate,’ he replied with a contrived smile.

‘Then why were you hitting it?’

‘Sometimes it’s good to release a bit of excess energy.’

‘What’s going on?’ Josie asked, squeezing past their son to reach the fridge.

‘Dad’s being weird.’ James picked up a hand-held games console from the kitchen table and shuffled out of the room.

‘How are you being weird?’

‘The kids think anyone over the age of eight is weird.’

Josie stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her forehead upon his neck. ‘What time do you have to leave in the morning?’

‘I’ve set the alarm for five-thirty. The car is charged and the roads should be quiet.’

‘Do you still think you’ll be able to take a couple of days off work for our anniversary?’

‘Yes, I don’t see why not,’ he nodded. ‘I have meetings in London earlier that week but after that should be okay.’

One of the many things Sam had failed to mention to his second wife was that while he was in the capital, he would be celebrating his tenth anniversary to his first spouse. Throughout almost a decade, he had learned simplicity, not elaborate lies, was the secret to maintaining two families who were completely oblivious to one another. It was why, when Josie gave birth to a daughter a year after Heidi had done the same, he insisted they name her after his late sister. His sister wasn’t dead, nor was she called Beccy. But his daughter with Heidi was called Beccy.

And when, by chance, he and Josie’s second child was a boy like his and Heidi’s, baby James inherited the name of his half-brother. Sam knew that if he kept both family set-ups as identical as possible, his chances of making mistakes were reduced. It didn’t stop the occasional errors from slipping through the net, like calling his first wife by his second wife’s name.

It was two days after he and Heidi had returned from their honeymoon when the results of his Match Your DNA test arrived by email. Sam had taken the test long before he’d met and fallen in love with Heidi the traditional way and before the security breach that almost destroyed the company’s reputation. And by the time he’d received a notification to say he and Heidi were not genetically made for one another, they were already married.

However, as content as he felt with his new bride, Sam could not rid himself of a nagging doubt – who was the greater love waiting for him out there? After much to-ing and fro-ing, he reasoned it would do no harm to find out and requested the details of his Match.

Within minutes of meeting near her home in Sheffield, some two hundred miles from his in Luton, Sam knew that Josie was the one. It was more than love at first sight, the intensity of what he felt for her was multiplied countless times. He likened it to a thousand small, but pleasurable, explosions going off in his body all at once. And he knew he was in trouble.