Rachel Weeping Read Free Page A

his business outside Hugo hopped back up the steps into the kitchen and ran to his designer Max & Molly basket at the end of the room, where he would now curl up for the evening. Michelle smiled as she turned the lights off in the kitchen and made her way to the other side of the house. Were it not for Chris’s ‘no dogs in the bedroom’ policy, she would have made sure Hugo’s basket was at the foot of their bed.
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    Chris sank back in the deep leather sofa and flicked without any purpose or goal through the channels on the 49 ′′ HD TV he and Michelle had bought earlier that year. The talk show he’d been watching had ended ten minutes ago but he didn’t want to go to bed just yet. Even though they had gone for the most expensive cable TV package on offer, he was still amazed at how, when he wanted to watch something, there never seemed to be anything on.
    He checked the PVR to see what they had recorded and scrolled through the episodes and movies they had on file. There were a few 20-minute sitcoms he could watch, but Michelle hadn’t watched them yet and he knew she would be upset if he watched them without her. The first rule of watching a series when you’re part of a couple was that you didn’t watch an episode without the other person being present. The second rule was that you watched what your wife enjoyed watching which, for Chris, ruled out anything that had a hint of science fiction or horror. With only so many hours in the day, it meant that when he actually had the time to watch TV, he ended up watching some mundane reality series.
    He scrolled past the backlog of reality shows, looking for the season finale of the science fiction series he knew he’d recorded the previous month. When he scrolled down to the end of their collection he realised that Michelle must have deleted it to make room for another show, something she wanted to watch.
    Chris shook his head and picked up his silver iPad Air. He flicked through his apps while CNN played in the background. Michelle had given him the tablet for Christmas and, after a day of finding his way around it, he was hooked. He could spend hours trying out the different apps, his favourites being the social media ones.
    He opened his Facebook account and a smile stole over his face as he noted the red icon indicating that he had twelve new notifications. There were the usual Candy Crush invitations, which he immediately deleted, and a couple of likes and comments on a photo he’d posted of a cappuccino he had had that morning at his favourite cafe, The Whippet. Scrolling through his timeline, he liked a photo of a friend’s baby, congratulated a couple who had just gotten engaged, and wished his cousin happy birthday, a date that he would never have remembered were it not for the reminder in the corner of the window on the page.
    As he moved back up to the top of the timeline he noticed the ‘ people you may know ’ section and paused on the profiles of the people with whom the Facebook algorithm was suggesting he should consider interacting. Chris had to admit that he loved the voyeuristic side of Facebook. He could spend ages going through the profiles of old friends, even strangers sometimes, seeing how they lived and imagining how he might interact with them if they ever met up in person.
    The first was Nicholas Alexander, a high school water polo teammate he hadn’t seen in years. Chris entered Nicholas’s profile but except for his profile picture, the security settings wouldn’t allow him to see anything else. He hit ‘ add ’ anyway and returned to the ‘ people you may know ’ page to see who else was there.
    Anja Fouche was next, an attractive redhead who had recently joined his company as PA to one of the directors. He couldn’t say he knew her as they’d only really seen each other in passing. Her work station was across the open plan area from his office.