Page 21 of The Girlfriend’s Secret

I wait as Frederik does as I say and reads the note before he looks back up at me with a furrowed brow.

‘What is this?’ he asks.

‘I have no idea, but it’s troubling, isn’t it?’

‘It’s also none of our business,’ Frederik says before turning away from me.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To give this back to Haven.’

‘What? You can’t do that!’ I cry as I get off the bed and hurry to intercept my husband before he can reach the door.

‘We have to give it back to her. It doesn’t belong to us, and she thinks she lost it.’

‘But then she’ll know I was lying to her!’

I realise that I am now the one who needs to keep my voice down, but it’s hard to do so when I’m panicking at my husband’s stupidity. At least I have managed to position myself between him and the door though.

‘Well, then maybe you shouldn’t have lied to her, and you wouldn’t have this problem,’ Frederik says very unhelpfully.

‘She lied to us too,’ I point out.

‘How so?’

‘I asked her if the paper in her pocket had been anything important and she said it didn’t matter.’

‘That might be the case.’

‘But it’s clearly not because there’s a phone number on there alongside a very mysterious message mentioning something about trouble. So I would say it is important, wouldn’t you?’

‘We don’t know because it doesn’t belong to us, so we shouldn’t have seen it,’ Frederik replies and he goes to reach the door again, but I move to block him once more.

‘Just give it back to me. I never should have shown it to you,’ I say, trying to grab the paper from my husband’s hand.

‘You never should have looked at it in the first place,’ he tells me. ‘Seriously, I thought you’d know better than this after what has already happened between you and Haven since she got here.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean that you’ve already made some mistakes with your approach to her, so you can’t afford many more.’

‘Excuse me?’ I snap, angry at my husband accusing me of making mistakes.

‘You know what I mean,’ he says. ‘You’ve already accused Haven of only being with Joel for his inheritance money and then you got caught looking at her phone. I hardly think this is going to help things now, is it?’

‘No, it won’t, which is why you cannot give that note back to her,’ I say. ‘And before you accuse me of making mistakes, I’ll remind you that I am only looking out for our son and making sure that Haven has his best interests at heart. I thought you knew that.’

‘Yes, I do know that,’ Frederik sighs.

‘Then give me the note back,’ I plead and, mercifully, he hands it over.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ he asks me as I go back to bed.

‘I don’t know,’ I reply, but that is a lie because I do know. I’m just not going to tell my husband because he’s not proven to me that he can be useful when it comes to trying to find out if Haven is hiding anything. But my plan is clear in my mind.

I’m going to call the number on the note and see who answers the phone. Then I’m going to ask them about Haven and try to learn as much as I can about her. Based on what I find, I will know if she is still suitable to be with my son or not.

If she is, great.