The Surrogate 4 (Chapters 23 – 32)

SPOILERS!!!

I feel so sorry for Kat as one or more people are there to hurt her. Nick, her husband, is no help. When she confronts him about his lies the night she returned and he wasn’t at home, he tells her that there was a problem at work and he spent the night at the site of an estate home. And she buys his excuses!!! I don’t believe him at all!!! He claims that he is not having an affair, but he mentions Natasha. I think he is having an affair with Clare, the neighbour. Clare is away when Nick is away, and Nick mentions talking to Nick, and Clare does the same. And Kat sees a bunch of flowers delivered to Clare’s house with the flowers that Nick usually gives her. I think he is lying!!! Maybe the author is trying to mislead us, and Nick is not having an affair with Clare even though all the evidence shows differently. Maybe what he hides is something to do with his past.

In the flashbacks about his childhood/youth, we see that his father’s behaviour mellowed when his mother was sick with cancer. Yet, when she was in remission, Nick’s father started again to be horrible. Nick begged his mother to leave, but she wouldn’t heed him. On Nick’s nineteenth birthday his mum gave him an ordinary mobile phone, which she claimed she had saved money for, and then he returned home after being with Richard, he heard his parents arguing about the mobile, and then his father hit his mother. Nick got so angry that he confronted the man and hit him several times. The chapter ends with Nick’s parents bleeding on the floor and Nick thinking he got too far. Does this mean he killed his father? Is that why he won’t talk about his parents to Kat? But what does his past have to do with the present? I can’t think what he is hiding other than an affair.

Kat is not going through the best time of her life. She has the feeling that someone is watching her, and even once she saw some footprints on the snow, but then the rain erased them. Nick doesn’t believe him and even calls her paranoid. Then she starts getting cold calls, and whenever she picks up the phone, she can hear someone’s breath on the other side of the line. Kat is very scared. Then the day when Lisa comes to stay, someone leaves a wreath at the front door with “RIP” written in red letters, and then when she goes to the drama group to rehearse, she gets locked in the toilet. Who is doing all this? I have the hunch that it is Lisa. She is not reliable, and I think her purpose has been to harm Kat all along. I don’t thinks he is even pregnant. Kat hasn’t still gone to the doctor with her as Lisa keeps giving her excuses. The scan she is supposed to have has not been done because in her hospital the machine is out of order. Also, when Kat says she wants to hear the baby’s heartbeat, Lisa simply records the sound on her mobile phone, and then when Kat tries to touch her protruding bump, she pulls away. I am almost certain that Lisa is not pregnant, and she is doing all these things (the cold calls, the watching…) to Kat. What I also suspect is that she is working with Aaron, and maybe he is even her husband. When Kat saw him at the hospital, she noticed the wedding band.

In the flashbacks about Kat’s past, there are many references to someone keeping her locked in a confined space, but it is not clear to understand what is happening there. Then Kat remembers the last day at school and as she and Lisa were emptying their lockers, she noticed Lisa dropping something, and when she picked it up, she realised that it was some drug. Kat was shocked as Lisa admitted that it was something that she was taking to lose weight. Kat knew that the particular drug was damaging and as she started upbraiding her friend, Aaron stepped in. Kat realised that Aaron was her dealer, and she threatened to report him, and Aaron became violent and press his hand around her neck. Lisa persuaded him to let go, and on the way home Kat tried to talk Lisa into stopping taking the drugs, but Lisa won’t hear about it. That night, feeling worried Kat lay awake in bed when she got a text from Jake, telling her to meet him in the park in twenty minutes. When she sneaked out of the house and went to the park, she saw Aaron’s van and realised that it must have been Lisa, who sent her the text using Jake’s mobile. So the flashbacks about her being locked must be about Aaron and all the business with the drugs he was supplying now only Lisa but other people as well with.

Such a gripping novel. I feel so sorry for Kat. Yet, I also think she is acting too naive and foolish. From the first she has the nagging feeling that Lisa is not reliable. Yet, she decides to trust her. And then it is clear that there is something wrong with Nick, and it is clear that it is not a job thing, but Kat decides to believe him even though deep down she knows that there is something more.

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