My Dead Husband, page 1
My Dead Husband
NJ Moss
Copyright © 2022 NJ Moss
The right of NJ Moss to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Bloodhound Books.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
Print ISBN 978-1-914614-65-1
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
A note from the publisher
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All Your Fault
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For Krystle, and for Mum x
1
‘Your husband is dead. I’d think you’d have the decency to show some remorse.’
I held the phone to my ear, looking out the window at the sun rising over the sea. It glittered and, I thought as I let the news wash over me, it was quite beautiful this morning.
Kayden was gone: suicide, Paisley had told me. That abusive sadistic narcissist would be in the ground soon… and she expected me to be sad?
‘Hello,’ my mother-in-law snapped. ‘Are you there?’
I cautioned myself not to allow my smile to come across in my tone. Kayden was evil. He’d sent stars of concussion glimmering across my vision countless times, had forced the sight of my own blood to become commonplace, had painted my body in deep purple and ice-blue bruises. But he was still her only child. ‘Yes. I’m here. I’m trying to process it all.’
I had to leave for my bus, but it hardly seemed the best thing to say. I glanced down at the table where my half-eaten toast lay, next to the notebook I sometimes jotted ideas in. I’d sat down to this pre-work ritual with an estranged husband who refused to participate in divorce talk. Now I was free of him. It felt like a sharp studded collar being removed from my throat.
‘He mentioned you in the note.’ There was unmistakable vindictiveness in her voice. Her sweet Kayden could do no wrong. Shatter an orbital bone, snap a wrist: it was fair game as far as she was concerned. ‘He said you drove him to it.’
The deranged urge to cheer whelmed up in me. I touched my face, as though Paisley had spirited down from Scotland and come to Weston, the small seaside town I called home: as though she was spying on me with binoculars and I had to hide my smile.
‘Oh.’
‘Oh? Oh? Didn’t you hear me, Ellie? He slit his wrists and he said it was your fault. Surely that deserves more than an oh.’
I bit down a hundred angry sentiments. Confrontation – of others, of myself – had never been something I was good at. It either never happened or happened too passionately. Perhaps that was why it took me so long to leave Kayden. Perhaps that was why I was swept along by him in the first place.
‘You’ve been kept out of the will and you’re not welcome at the funeral.’ Her thick Scottish brogue became grisly with rage. It was clear she’d expected something from me, some reaction, and I wasn’t fulfilling my role. As if I wanted to be invited to the fucking funeral. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. My son was nothing but–’
I hung up.
It was easy, placing my phone atop my notebook, where it instantly started to vibrate as Paisley rang me back. She needed to rant and scream and take metaphoric chunks of flesh as her twisted son had taken real ones. But there were hundreds of miles separating us and Paisley wasn’t the sort to drive down to England to make a point.
Her son had been nothing but a monster, a smiling demon who raged and tormented the moment the doors closed. I refused to listen to her justifications.
I was free. For the first time in years, life was good, untinged by the presence of Kayden lurking behind every positive thing that happened to me. I didn’t have to flinch every time a cupboard slammed, sure there was a fist soon to follow. You didn’t get the right pasta sauce… I didn’t have to freeze when a floorboard creaked at night, awaiting a hand slithering under the covers.
I didn’t have to think, Maybe he’ll get bored. Maybe he’ll go crazy. Maybe he’ll come back and make me pay. Because even after he’d left, that fear was always there, turning shadows into attackers.
With him gone, perhaps I could enjoy the good things, like my publishing deal. My book was going to be released in a few weeks and I hadn’t allowed myself ten full minutes of happiness, because living with the aftershocks of Kayden made enjoying anything dangerous. Any second it could be snatched away.
‘But he’s dead,’ I whispered, as though that would make it feel true.
And then I laughed, giggling as I hadn’t since I was a girl: before I learned I was a little broken, a little strange, a little susceptible to the dark corners of the mind. I gripped my sides and I stared at the sea, revelling in the delight of my husband’s death.
2
I walked out the front door with a skip in my step, far more cheerful than I’d felt in a long time. My ground-floor flat sat atop the tallest hill in Weston, giving me a view of the sea and snatches of the beach and the promenade. It truly was a beautiful day, the horizon glistening, the sort of thing it had been difficult to appreciate when I was constantly on alert for Kayden.
I headed down the hill toward the bus stop, fighting the crazed urge to whistle a tune.
My husband’s dead, my husband’s dead. I felt like screaming it at everybody I passed.
I sat down at the bus stop and let out a breath, warning myself to calm down. I was starting to feel ramped up, manic. I didn’t like to toss labels at myself, but the truth was I’d experienced anxiety for much of my life – it was one of the reasons I’d never learned to drive – and anxiety’s sister emotion was mania.
It was tempting to grin widely at strangers as they strolled by, to share the news which was making me want to shout in relief. I supposed that was better than panic attacks throttling me, but it was less than ideal. A man was dead. No matter who he was, no matter how revolting, it wasn’t a reason to smile.
But that was bullshit.
Kayden had swept into my life as though he was planning on malforming me with his depraved designs.
We’d met at the beach when I was sitting down with a book one summer evening, my head buried in the pages, inhaling the scent of paper and sand. A shadow had fallen over me, and that should’ve been a warning: his shadow, the way he loomed. I should’ve taken note of that instead of his disarming smile and his silver hair.
He was older than me by more than a decade, but he held his age well, as though it was a choice and not a necessity. His hair was swept aside and his eyes were bright blue, stark, the sort of eyes that – I thought at the time – looked into me and liked what they saw.
‘Nothing better than a good book on a sunny day.’ His voice was thick and alluring and deep. It was husky. I hated thinking about how badly I’d ached for it the first time he spoke to me. ‘Mind if I join you?’
I should have said no. I should have leapt up and lashed my nails at him like a feral cat, spat at him, done anything to warn him away. But instead I blushed and nodded. ‘Sure.’
I was flattered by his attention, t
After that first meeting I was lost.
He did all the right things, made all the Hollywood gestures. There were flowers and dates and then, a few months into this whirlwind romance, he got down on one knee and told me how much he loved me. ‘I never knew a man like me could feel this. I never knew these doors were inside of me. But you’ve opened up parts of me I never knew existed. Ellie Salter, will you marry me?’
Tears of unbridled happiness had flowed down my cheeks and I jumped around in crazed joy. What a moron I’d been, allowing him to puppeteer me with such ease.
I glanced up when the bus pulled into the stop, jolting me from my recollections.
The past was often a pit for me, threatening to swallow me up. If I wasn’t thinking about Kayden, I was thinking about Theo, the first boy who’d ever stolen my heart. But I couldn’t think about my childhood sweetheart for too long without thinking about the other thing, the confusing thing I never liked to steer near to. It was too complicated, too messy, too terrifying not to understand my own mind and memory.
I climbed onto the bus and took a seat at the back, laying my forehead against the glass.
It hadn’t taken long for Kayden to reveal the monster behind his smile.
It happened as soon as we’d said I do.
It was small things at first: the dishes weren’t clean enough, I’d forgotten to straighten the curtains, his shoes weren’t where he’d left them. From there it progressed with the everyday casualness of abuse.
How pathetically and tragically simple it had been: getting used to the way he would inflict punishment on me. A thud to the base of my spine, a stiff punch, or maybe a looping wood-thick arm around my throat as he squeezed and loosened, squeezed and loosened his grip over and over, laughing in my ear as my legs weakened and my world became hazy with how close to unconsciousness I was.
No, I refused to think about that. I’d picture him slumped with his wrists slit open instead, blood soaking into the carpet, his lips twisted into a deathly grimace instead of his usual deceiving smile.
That prompted my lips to twitch upward again, another grin trying to take hold of my face.
I took out my mobile, navigating to Facebook. I spent the rest of the journey responding to comments, liking book-related statuses, generally building up my presence amongst readers so they’d recognise my name when my book came out. That was how it had started anyway, but now I really enjoyed the interactions, the flurry of notifications and replies and banter. It was a welcome distraction from the madness of this morning.
My book was being published by a small digital-first publisher, meaning they specialised in e-books. That was why I felt compelled to do my part to get my name out there. In the indie spirit, we were all in this together.
I found myself able to view my publishing contract with fresh appreciation this morning. Previously, I’d let negative thoughts seep into my mind: it’s not a big publisher, hardly anybody will read your book, you’re nothing special. But now that Kayden was gone, I was able to push all of that aside.
I’d written a book. I’d edited a book. And it had found a home.
Perhaps those negative thoughts had been Kayden, whispering to me over the miles, picking at every little thing like he always did. Knowing he’d bled out – knowing he’d never bend me over the kitchen divider and roughly take me again – I let my head fall back, a feeling of pride moving through me. Or at least a cousin of pride, a convincing pretender. But anything was better than the numbness I’d felt before this.
I should be proud. I’d achieved what so many people strived for, a book deal with a reputable publisher, digital-first or not.
After sorting my social media stuff, I watched Weston drift by, wondering how Mum would react to the news of Kayden’s death.
3
I rounded the corner that led toward Mum’s house. I always thought of it as her house, though I had lived there for my whole childhood. The moment I’d left home Mum had renovated, as though she’d needed to put that period of her life behind her. She’d repainted the stucco exterior salmon-pink, added hanging baskets, tall hedges that framed a gravel path, flower beds, ivy creepers… and on and on, wiping away any sign of what it had once been.
I couldn’t blame her.
We’d lived there when Dad died. His death had triggered her psychosis, her schizophrenia exploding back into her personality when it had lain dormant for so long. I didn’t understand why she hadn’t moved, but perhaps she thought she could reclaim the piece of herself that had died with Dad.
We rarely talked about such things.
This was the house she’d fled one evening when I was thirteen, a bread knife in her hand, utterly naked, a fierce glint in her eyes as she stood at the end of the pathway. There had been no hedges to protect her modesty then.
‘I have to find them, Ellie,’ she’d said as I stood at the door, pleading with her to come inside.
‘Find who?’
‘They’re watching me. They’re watching us.’
It had been an early Saturday morning and the street was waking up, music playing lightly from a window, a dog yapping a few houses over. Mum had flinched at every noise, her breasts bobbing offensively, making me want to look away even as I crept over to her. She’d gone through a phase of tearing her clothes off, convinced they were causing her pain. I’d learned by then to move slowly, hands raised, palms flat, to show her I didn’t mean any harm.
She cried when I brought her inside and wrapped a blanket around her. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
I’d managed to stay calm through that incident, but that wasn’t always the case.
There had been times when I’d screamed at her: ‘Mad bitch, what the fuck is wrong with you? I wish I had a normal mum. I wish you were dead.’ She’d shaved her hair off soon after one argument, convinced there were small electronic devices crawling over her scalp.
‘They’re sneaking into my brain.’
She’d scratched her scalp raw, scratched so hard her fingernails had blunted against her skull, convinced she would have to tear her head to pieces to get at the invaders.
Once, she’d erected an elaborate blanket fortress in my bedroom, wrapping tight knots around my bedposts, the door handle, billowing from the ceiling until the entire room was a criss-crossing interplay of light, changing colour depending on which blanket it was passing through. Perhaps this would’ve been fun when I was five or six, but I was a teenager and she was ranting the whole time, something about how the blankets protected us from the radiation, and they were out to get us. It was always that.
They’re out to get us.
There were so many theys I stopped counting.
These sorts of incidents had become routine in the years after Dad’s death. It was like the cancer had eaten away at her sanity as much as his lungs. But she was never abusive. Perhaps she was mean sometimes. Perhaps she allowed moods and imagined whispers to make her vindictive for a short while. But I always knew, when it mattered, she loved me.
