If summer just isn’t your thing and instead you’re pining for chilly days and wintry nights, why not escape to the snow-covered Scottish Highlands in Alice Feeney’s brand new gripping thriller, Rock Paper Scissors? Read an extract below!
Amelia
February 2020
My husband doesn’t recognise my face.
I feel him staring at me as I drive, and wonder what he sees. Nobody else looks familiar to him either, but it is still strange to think that the man I married wouldn’t be able to pick me out in a police line-up.
I know the expression his face is wearing without having to look. It’s the sulky, petulant, I told you so version, so I concentrate on the road instead. I need to. The snow is falling faster now, it’s like driving in a white-out, and the windscreen wipers on my Morris Minor Traveller are struggling to cope. The car – like me – was made in 1978. If you look after things, they will last a life- time, but I suspect my husband might like to trade us both in for a younger model. Adam has checked his seatbelt a hundred times since we left home, and his hands are balled into conjoined fists on his lap. The journey from London up to Scotland should have taken no more than eight hours, but I daren’t drive any faster in this storm. Even though it’s starting to get dark, and it seems we might be lost in more ways than one.
Can a weekend away save a marriage? That’s what my husband
said when the counsellor suggested it. Every time his words replay in my mind, a new list of regrets writes itself inside my head. To have wasted so much of our lives by not really living them makes me feel so sad. We weren’t always the people we are now, but our memories of the past can make liars of us all. That’s why I’m focussing on the future. Mine. Some days I still picture him in it, but there are moments when I imagine what it would be like to be on my own again. It isn’t what I want, but I do wonder whether it might be best for both of us. Time can change relationships like the sea reshapes the sand.
He said we should postpone this trip when we saw the weather warnings, but I couldn’t. We both know this weekend away is a last chance to fix things. Or at least to try. He hasn’t forgotten that.
It’s not my husband’s fault that he forgets who I am.
Rock Paper Scissors is available now in paperback, eBook and audio here.
