It starts with Emily furious that her boss Andrew won’t let her have some time off for a weekend away with her friends (also from work). She wants to write to her boyfriend Stuart about it, but in her hurry she makes a mistake and she sends it to three friends from work. Seth and also Jasmine and Lucinda, the girls that were supposed to go with her away for the weekend. In that text she wrote “I hope he dies”, and in answer to their obvious questions she explains she wanted to write “I hope he does”, as in ‘he does, let me have some time off work’.
At home she has a row with Stuart, he leaves and she stays home alone. The next day the police tell her that Andrew has been killed!
This is how it starts, but the mystery is not as important as everything else; you think you’re trying to discover who did it, but you’re not.
What happens is: Jasmine is so shocked she can’t speak or breathe and Emily tells the police that Andrew was having an affair with Lucinda, and his wife found it out and left him. She doesn’t feel guilty about giving them her friend’s name because the fact that she was sleeping with ‘the enemy’ makes her a traitor in her eyes.
Stuart tells her he found a note with the words “you wanted him dead your wish is my command” and they take it to the police. Emily asks Seth if he sent it but he denies. Stuart still tells the police that Seth did it, because he always hated him, and becomes angry when Emily dismisses the possibility. He accuses her of covering for him, of being so naive like a child so that he always has to protect her... when they get home they have another row, a violent one, so after he goes out Emily drives to Yasmin’s place to pass the night. They talk, Emily admits that sometimes Stuart hurts her, but also that she’s too weak to leave him and start from scratch, she loves him when he’s not angry, and for the most part they get along fine... although his career is obviously more important and he tells her that she’ll be the one to give it up when they’ll have children, so why bother with it in the first place? :-/
That note weighs on her because she starts wondering if one of her friends who received the text really killed him, for her. She starts avoiding Seth who is hurt by her behaviour, and Lucinda’s already
avoiding her after she gave her name to the police. She still drives home with Jasmine, and is shocked when she confesses, out of the blue, that she was in love with Andrew and it was her, not Lucinda. It’s such a shock that instead of realizing why she was crying so much over it she becomes furious, she says “how could you? how could you be in love with a man so terrible, a man who’s a bully, who has such little respect for women..” and it’s Yasmin’s turn now: “how could you ?”.
Now Emily cancels her weekend out, and she understands Yasmin’s remark when she tells Stuart about the weekend and he’s glad because he tells her that she can’t go out with single girls “like a bunch of slags..” - “Yasmin’s words haunt me. The words she’d thrown back at me when I’d asked how she could have loved such a cruel, cold man. ‘And how could you?’ she’d said. How could I indeed”.
Emily doesn’t go to work anymore, after what happened. She takes the garbage out so Stuart won’t get upset at her, and by chance she finds a piece of paper, when Stuart had practiced writing the note... she goes straight to the police, wondering if he had killed Andrew thinking that was what she wanted (yeah right, does he ever do things to please her? :-/ ) but they assure her it wasn’t him, they have Andrew’s wife in custody, she confessed of killing him after years of abuse.
The only thing that made her suspect of her friends had been that note, that Stuart had forged for this exact purpose, so she wouldn’t trust them anymore - and, I add, so that he could separate her from her friends so that she’d only have him and his power over her would be complete.
She finally realizes that all the kicks, the shoves, the twists of the wrist, they are not little things, they are abuse indeed, and she has to do something about it, she can’t go on living with a bully. She packs her bag while he’s out, surprised but not too much at how everything in that house is Stuart’s, and goes back to her parents, dumping him with a text.
The story ends, so we don’t know how it’ll go on, if he’ll let it go or if she’ll end up in the news like many other girls... if I were her I’d try going as far away as I can...
So, the story is about relationships, mainly. How a single text and a note have ruined friendships and made her realize she didn’t have to live with a bully.
I would have liked an epilogue to know that she keeps in touch with at least Yasmin, but that wasn’t crucial to the story.
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