What Happened Next? Episode One

Episode One

You have mail

It was a typical Thursday evening for me: snuggled up on the couch under a blanket as I tried without success to find something decent to watch on TV, with a glass of wine going warm on the side table. As I mindlessly scrolled through the seemingly endless supply of true crime documentaries, budget-friendly films and tacky reality shows, I was somewhat glad of the interruption when my phone made a beeping noise beside me. As I thoughtlessly gazed at my device, the notification piqued my curiosity, so I dropped the remote and unlocked my phone to see what it was.

It was an email, not unlike the hundreds of spam messages I received daily, but I furrowed my brow when the subject line read, ‘Thank you for your support.’ The name of the person who sent it didn’t ring a bell, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember signing up for Philip Anthony Smith’s mailing list in the first place. That being said, it wouldn’t be the first time I had subscribed to something after a glass of wine and then promptly forgotten about it, so I clicked it open out of idle curiosity.

It was a book announcement for a soon-to-be-released psychological thriller I had never heard of called ‘What Happens Next?’ The blurb was vague—something about obsession and the price of staying quiet. It seemed reasonably interesting but nothing special, so I almost deleted it out of reflex until I saw the cover and my stomach hollowed out.

“What the hell?” I mumbled to myself.

The cover was a photo of a house. My house.

It had the same ivy creeping up the side, the same hairline crack in the front step, and even the bird-shaped rust stain on the porch gutter that I begged Mark to sort out weeks ago, but he still hadn’t got around to it. The longer I stared, the more I began to panic, and my trembling hands scrolled up and down the short email as I desperately tried to work out whether it was some kind of trick, a cruel joke from a friend, or just clever marketing. To my horror, it seemed entirely genuine and even had an Amazon listing attached to the book, using the same image that was on the email.

Without thinking, I tapped the link to the author’s website. It was sparse—just a shop link, a blog with zero posts, and a hastily written about page with a posed photograph. Although he was fairly distinctive-looking, I didn’t recognise him at first, not until I spotted the thick beard covering most of his face and his brown, slicked-back hair that was streaked with grey. My heart was in my throat when I realised that he had been to my house less than a week before, apparently lost and asking directions for someplace I had never heard of.

Before I dropped my phone out of fright, another email came through, which stopped me in my tracks, and my thumb hovered over it for a second until I finally clicked it.

“I know what you did,” it read.