Watched: When Road Rage Follows You Home Read Free

simply because of his new job. Not that she could blame him. She was the one who insisted she would do up the house while he went to work, even if that meant stripping, papering, painting and doing everything else herself.
    What a stupid statement that now seemed.
    In her desperation to get away from her parents, Esther had somehow convinced herself it was a good idea to take on renovating at least two full bedrooms, a hallway and a staircase – not to mention landscaping what was, in essence, a jungle.
    As she dug the scraper into the wall in a failed attempt to remove the welded-on wallpaper, Esther felt the blade catch a camouflaged screw, before clinking and falling to the ground. She plucked it from between the floorboards, holding it up into the sunlight, but the sharp end had snapped too. Somewhere in among the boxes, there was a replacement but Esther couldn’t be bothered hunting and she wanted to get out of the house anyway, if only for a few minutes. It was far too bright and sunny to spend the entire day in a smoggy room scratching the walls.
    Esther’s car was a small, metallic purple Fiat. Charlie had joked that the only reason she wanted something so compact was because she couldn’t park it otherwise, which was a little too close to the truth for her liking. Still, it was better than driving around in the sleek, black company BMW that he’d been given as part of his new job. In his suit with the top button done up until it was practically choking him, Charlie looked every inch the big car/little dick-type she would usually make fun of, much as she knew that wasn’t what he was actually like. As soon as the tie and jacket came off, he was back to being her Charlie again. She much preferred him dressed down, trying to squeeze into her car and joking that he was going to have to sit in the back seat so that there was room for his feet to touch the pedals.
    After a month of on-off moving that had culminated over the weekend, Esther had a vague idea of where the town centre and the various shopping areas were in relation to the house. Well, she remembered a B&Q being somewhere near a pub called the Sheep & Anchor and if she could find the main road, she had a fifty per cent chance of heading in the right direction.
    Esther set off quite enjoying the fact that she didn’t really know where she was going. The estate was a mix of red-brick housing association flats and two-bedroom houses, alongside rows of slightly larger private dwellings. The roads were almost empty and, after a series of turns she wouldn’t remember, Esther stumbled across a play park next to a community centre advertising Slimming World meetings and a weekly coffee morning.
    A little further along was a small church with bright stained-glass windows and a pretty white steeple. To the side was a primary school attached to a wide playground with luminously painted patterns on the ground. Esther had already done the research, knowing that it had the third-best results in the area. With house prices utterly out of their reach around the top two schools, it was the main reason they’d started looking for houses on this estate. Thoughts of children and the future were finally a reality now they had their own space.
    Esther reached the end of the road, waiting at an empty T-junction with a childishly fun sense of being lost. There were no street signs, only the name of a road she didn’t recognise. She could use the maps on her phone to check where she was but that would take the enjoyment out of it. Guessing left, Esther continued to drive, recognising odd glimpses of houses they had thought about offering on. There had been one with a beautiful pond, another with a conservatory the width of the house that faced east. The owners told them how it devoured the sun every morning, which, on a day like this, would have been wonderful to enjoy. Both of those, and all of the others they had liked, were beyond their budget, leaving them with the