I Choose You

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Gayle Curtis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542008181

  ISBN-10: 1542008182

  Cover design by Heike Schüssler

  For my lovely parents, and Neil Diamond, whose music in the summer of 1976 I suspect had something to do with my appearance the following year.

  And for my constants from the very beginning, Christopher, Paul, Susan, Catherine and Marty.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Holding a gun to a child’s head isn’t something I will ever forget. The small boy was just as startled to find me in his home as I was at discovering he was there. Shortly after the gun had fired, I heard a quiet, gentle sob and discovered him on the stairs. Fear had rendered him frozen and there was a dark stain seeping into his blue pyjamas, his anxiety taking control. We stared at one another for quite some time, his eyes eventually wandering slowly down to the gun in my hand. I had no idea how long he’d been sitting there, what he’d witnessed, what images would stay with him. Would he be able to understand any of it, in his innocence?

  His position on the staircase gave him full view of the kitchen. I turned to look at what he’d seen. The man I assumed to be his father was sitting at the table, a bullet through the side of his head, an obituary that would be taken for a suicide note tucked under his left hand, the debris from the exit wound sprayed across the cupboards. I had been sitting opposite, observing the silence, the shift that death always leaves behind, a brief pause in time, when the sound of the young child had pierced the atmosphere.

  I often wonder how I could have explained everything in a better way. I guess at such a young age, it was incomprehensible to him, way out of his reach, or so I assumed.

  I can still remember the touch of his soft hair on my fingers as I guided him up the stairs, the muzzle of the gun pressed into his back with my other hand. He was silent the entire time, startled into a shocked kind of muteness – not one word came out of his mouth as he allowed me to guide him to his bedroom at the top of the stairs. The glow of his bedside lamp shone on the hall floor.

  Having told the young boy to get back into bed and not move, I spent the next hour or so downstairs thinking.

  It was over, the game had come to an end. I’d known it would one day. If nothing else, the similarities of each case would soon lead to suspicion.

  Disappointment flooded me. I’d always anticipated my last participant would be a survivor, but John was none of the things he’d blustered about when I’d first met him. After we’d become friends, we spent many an evening discussing philosophy and the meaning of our existence. John said he knew the importance of life, how vital it was to evolve and embrace change, but when I asked him to show me, he failed to deliver. My game, even though we had talked about it before, shocked him, and I could see he hadn’t been expecting it. This is nothing new – most of my participants are startled by it.

  ‘Shoot yourself or be shot. Are you going to do it, or will I?’ I said, placing one revolver on the table in front of me, and keeping the other in my hand. ‘What’s your answer going to be?’

  ‘What?’ John attempted to stand up, tipping his chair and almost losing his balance.

  ‘Sit down, John. Otherwise I won’t give you the opportunity to save yourself.’ He sat down, they always do. ‘You have sixty seconds to answer me. Plenty of time to think about it.’

  ‘You’re fucking crazy. I’m not playing this game.’ John laughed and took a large swig of his whiskey.

  ‘The clock is ticking, John.’ I’d already started the timer on the watch I carried with me. ‘What’s it going to be?’

  ‘I think that whiskey has gone to your head.’

  I pointed the gun at him.

  John put his hands up, as if I were a police officer about to arrest him. Most of them do this. It’s a strange movement, but all sense of reason is lost when you’re fearing for your life.

  ‘You can’t be serious!’

  ‘Deadly.’

  Let’s just freeze this frame right here. It astounds me that, when you give people a proposition regarding their survival, they don’t use the sixty seconds they have left wisely. They don’t listen. Instead, they allow their emotions to override their ability to problem-solve. Such was the situation with John. So, it was a disappointing end to everything, but life is about change, and everything must evolve, eventually.

  When I returned upstairs, the young boy was gone. His instinct to survive had kicked in and he’d fled. I searched the property, including the grounds, and eventually found him hiding in one of the barns behind a silo. I can sense a presence, and children, especially when they are fearful, don’t have the ability to stay completely still. I could hear his heart beating like a skittish hare’s, and when I caught him, he screamed like a young rabbit.

  I led him back towards the house. The boy had seen me. He was a witness. I had no choice.

  CHAPTER ONE

  NOW

  The pavement hit Elise on her right hip, elbow and shoulder, and the wall smacked her head, reminding her how much she hated herself, along with the rest of the world. Pins prickled the inside back of her nose, warm blood moved like a snake from her nostrils and into her mouth.

  ‘Hey!’ someone shouted at Mark Paton, the man who’d hit her in the face with the heel of his hand.

  Having been snatched so sharply from Elise’s arms, Louis was now in the full throes of a scream.

 
; A few people shouted for someone to call an ambulance, the police, was anyone a doctor?

  Mark ignored the crowd gathering and walked back into the shop where Elise had removed Louis from his pram. He emerged a moment later with the pushchair, angrily manoeuvring it one-handed, like it was an awkward supermarket trolley.

  Louis was still screaming; the sound gave Elise goosebumps across her arms and neck. She tried to stand up but was firmly held down by a well-meaning bystander.

  ‘You’re a crazy bitch!’ Mark shouted at Elise, violently shrugging off the man trying to restrain him. ‘Get some fucking help and leave us alone.’

  Elise pulled herself up to a sitting position. Leaning against the wall of the shop, she watched Mark shove his way through the people who had gathered at a distance. No one stopped him, and all she could manage to whisper was ‘He has my son,’ but no one could understand what she was saying – her lips were puffy and numb.

  Jane and Mark Paton. Mark and Jane Paton. Paton as in ‘Capon’. That’s how she’d remembered it when she’d first learned their names. They were both consultants at the hospital where Elise worked as a coordinator for the delivery suite – Jane was a surgeon and Mark specialised in paediatrics. They lived two streets away from where Elise and her husband Nathaniel used to live. They had her son, the child she’d given birth to twenty months ago.

  Elise had visited them weeks ago, not long after she’d spotted them with Louis – their choice of name, not hers – in the Maryon Wilson Park, where she would often walk. Elise felt she was on a bad footing from the get-go because they recognised her from the papers. Everyone knew Elise and Nathaniel Munroe. Any sympathy the public had for them had died long ago, when people learned all about their private lives and started to become suspicious. Now people frowned or smirked because they had reliable facts they’d retrieved from the tabloids that contradicted anything that Elise and Nathaniel might say publicly.

  ‘Try and stand up, love.’ Someone gently tugged at her arm. Another person told them to leave her and covered her up with a jacket, handing her a tissue for her bloody nose. That was when she realised the cold air she’d been feeling was because her skirt had risen over her thighs and stomach in the fall, leaving her exposed to everyone.

  Elise threw the jacket from her legs as she heard someone say, ‘That’s Ida Munroe’s mother.’ She manoeuvred herself on to all fours and, pressing her right hand on to the wall of the shop, managed to stand up, staggering backwards slightly as she swiped at the hands that were trying to steady her. The helpers wanting to help, just so they could tell a good story at work or down the pub. She’d done it herself hundreds of times – told a good story. Elise knew how to tell a cracking good yarn.

  She tried to walk, the opportunity to rescue her son fast slipping away now that Mark was out of sight. ‘Stop that man!’ she shouted, and then screamed, the force of her voice making her double over, and she staggered again. People were backing away now, and she heard someone say, ‘Don’t get involved.’ All except one woman, who claimed to be a medical professional and tried to sit her on the bench a little way down the road.

  ‘Fuck off.’ Elise pushed the woman away, her words long and drawn out.

  ‘I’ll wait with you until the ambulance arrives.’

  ‘I said, fuck off.’ Elise tried to focus on the woman’s face, but she was beginning to see double, visions sliding into her peripheral, reminding her of the kaleidoscopes she used to play with when she was a child.

  ‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

  ‘Everyone’s seen me before . . . Just piss off and leave me alone.’ Elise crouched down and steadied herself by placing her hands on the pavement.

  ‘At the hospital. You used to work there?’

  Elise stared up at the woman, momentarily stunned that someone should recognise her in a different capacity.

  ‘I’m one of the nurses on A & E. You used to be on the maternity unit. I know you, you’re Elise Munroe.’

  ‘That’s right. What of it?’

  ‘Nothing of it. We used to chat when we saw each other in the canteen. I’m Trish.’

  Elise tried to focus on the small woman with the soft face. She was familiar. She wasn’t familiar. She couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Listen to me, Trish. I don’t remember who you are. I’m sure I did know you before I got into this state, but there you go. Do yourself a favour and go home.’

  ‘Let’s go and sit down and have a proper chat.’ The woman gently pulled Elise to her feet and guided her towards the bench, where they waited for the emergency services. The crowds had dispersed, apart from the odd person glued to the spot, forgetting they weren’t at home watching the soaps but an actual human being in the street. A couple of them raised their iPhones and took pictures of her.

  Elise turned to look at Trish, squinting to see if she recognised her at all. There was a faint glimmer from another life that didn’t belong to her anymore, when she hadn’t been dosed up on prescription drugs.

  ‘I’m sorry about your daughter,’ Trish said.

  ‘I need to go home.’ Elise pushed herself up from the bench, throwing the tissue someone had given her to the ground.

  ‘The ambulance will be here in a minute. I can hear the sirens. Let them check you over.’

  ‘The police will nick me.’

  ‘Look, I’ll tell them I know you, you’ve had a bad day, you’re going through a nasty divorce and you’re a bit worse for wear. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’m not getting divorced.’ Elise laughed. ‘What gave you that idea?’

  ‘Oh . . . I just thought – the man?’ Trish gestured to where Mark had walked away.

  ‘Those bastards have my son. They stole him from the hospital and he’s mine, he belongs to me.’ Elise stabbed at her bony chest and sat back down next to Trish. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, I’m going to get him back. Whatever it takes, I’ll have him back. Even if it means killing Mark and Jane fucking Paton. That is a given.’

  The two women stared at one another for a few moments, until Trish stood up, said she had to get home and walked away.

  Unfazed, Elise pushed herself to her feet, pointed her finger as she always did when she was trying to get her bearings, and headed in the direction of their new home. The place where Nathaniel thought they’d be able to start again, away from the house they had shared with Ida, their daughter. Who, on her sixteenth birthday, had found herself in a situation so awful it resulted in a terrible turn of events.

  Elise and Nathaniel hadn’t been around the day Ida needed them. They were absent when they should have been saving her. Ever since, Elise had spent a lot of time thinking about the sequence of what happened that day, and how, if she’d altered things, even slightly, she might have been able to step in front of the fate that lay before her daughter. She hated fate, with all its surprises, and death with its unrelenting determination – they were fuckers. If she hadn’t been so eager to return to work after the birth of their third child, and had taken the full amount of maternity leave she was entitled to, she would have been at home. There’d have been no late shifts and they’d have had dinner on time, as a family. Wouldn’t they, she often thought to herself. Ida would still be alive, and no one would know who they were. They would be anonymous.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NOW

  Begging was an undignified practice that Nathaniel had become all too familiar with over the last twelve months. He pressed the bell to the Patons’ house and a long ring ensued, making sure they heard. Nathaniel was hoping Jane would answer the door, she was the easier one out of the two – calmer, more considered in her responses. Mark was hot-headed and tended to speak freely without thinking first.

  Mark answered and immediately shut the door once he realised who was standing there. Nathaniel caught the door with his hand and foot before it closed fully.

  ‘Please, listen to what I have to say. Just give me five minutes.’

  ‘You’ve got
to be joking, right? Get your foot out of the door or I’ll call the police.’

  Nathaniel pressed against the door harder. ‘Look, just give me five minutes and then I’ll leave you alone, I promise.’

  ‘Let him in, Mark.’ Jane appeared in the hallway. She was much taller than her husband, elegant and model-like, with fair hair and kind features. Against Mark’s stocky figure and dark roughness, they looked odd together as a couple.

  ‘Thank you. I promise not to take up too much of your time.’

  ‘You won’t, trust me.’ Mark walked purposefully into the sitting room, a place Nathaniel had been before, when he’d asked them not to pursue their complaint about Elise stalking them. After quite a lot of persuasion they’d agreed to withdraw it on the condition Elise left them alone. Shamelessly, Mark had used Ida as an excuse, and had eventually guilt-tripped them into understanding that Elise was suffering mentally and needed help. Nathaniel had naively believed Elise had learnt something from the degrading and very public arrest, and would promptly accept some help and move forward with her life. Now, here he was again with the trickier issue of overcoming attempted child abduction, and he had nothing left to tell them about Elise, having used every possible excuse already.

  ‘Say what you need to and please leave.’ Mark sat down in one of the armchairs on the far side of the room. Nathaniel waited for Jane to choose a seat and then perched on the edge of the sofa, so he could address them both.

  ‘I don’t want to make this any worse than it is. I don’t want to excuse what Elise has done. I simply want to apologise. If you decide to press charges against her, I’ll understand. I know what she’s done, how terrible it is . . . Let me finish.’ Nathaniel stopped Mark from interrupting him. ‘I can assure you I’ll get Elise all the help and support she needs and she won’t bother you again.’

  ‘Your wife won’t be bothering us anymore because we’ve applied for a restraining order.’

  Nathaniel nodded, surprised they hadn’t decided to do this before.

  Jane leant forward. ‘Have you taken advice from anyone? Has she been diagnosed with any kind of mental health issues? Post-natal depression or anything like that?’