The Girl on the Train

Wednesday, May 16, 2012. One year earlier. Megan Hipwell—whom Rachel knows as Jess—sits on her patio drinking coffee as the morning train stops just below her garden. Megan is annoyed by the train—it interrupts her fantasy of basking in the sun on the beach somewhere far away. As Megan listens to the train roll past, she wishes she were on it. As she hears the sound of her husband Scott calling out to her and asking if she wants another coffee, she feels the spell of her fantasy break.

That evening, Megan sits on the porch again, enjoying a martini. She reflects on her day—earlier, while working on an application to a fabrics course, she was distracted by a woman’s horrible screams coming from down the street. She ran out to the garden—and though she couldn’t see anything happening down the road in the other yard, she heard a woman begging another person to give her baby back. Megan ran up to the terrace and looked down to see two women, a few gardens over, fighting over a small child. At last, one woman carried the baby inside while the other stumbled around the garden in circles. The incident, Megan feels, is the most excitement she’s had in weeks. Now that she doesn’t have her art gallery, which recently closed down, her days are empty—she hates being a “happily married suburbanite.”

Tuesday, August 14, 2012. Megan gets dressed simply—even shabbily—to go to her new day job as a nanny for the people down the road. Bored and curious after the incident in May, Megan took the childminding job at number 23. Scott was excited, hoping being around a baby so much would make Megan want to have one of her own—but so far, the job has had the opposite effect. Megan misses her job at the gallery and resents spending so much time with a child.

Thursday, August 16, 2012. Megan quits her job as a nanny for Anna and Tom Watson—finally, she feels free. She worries that Scott will be mad at her—but as a self-proclaimed “mistress of self-reinvention,” Megan only feels excitement about what role she’ll inhabit next. She decides to tell Scott that she quit because Tom was hitting on her in order to prevent him from being angry with her for giving up the job.

Thursday, September 20, 2012. After a sleepless night, Megan feels itchy and restless; she wishes that she could shave her head or take a trip. She misses her big brother, Ben, who always told her that they’d ride their motorbikes all around the world: from Paris to Spain, down the Pacific Coast of the U.S., and throughout South America. Ben, however, died in a motorcycle accident when he was still a teenager. Megan has never gotten over his death—and when she feels especially sad about it, she has to fight the impulse to run away. She has decided to begin seeing a therapist—Scott recently suggested it after noticing how little she’s been sleeping. Megan, however, feels that her sleeping problems are tied to her dissatisfaction with being merely someone’s wife.

After a long wait at the office, Megan finally meets with her new therapist: Dr. Kamal Abdic. Throughout the introductory appointment, Megan finds herself deeply attracted to the handsome therapist. As Abdic asks Megan about alcohol use and whether she abuses drugs, Megan slyly says that she has “other vices.” That evening, when she arrives home, Scott asks her how the appointment went and whether she talked to the therapist about Ben. Megan pities Scott, who foolishly believes that all her problems stem from her brother’s death.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012. Megan wakes up, having finally slept for a few hours. Feeling cooped up, she decides to go for a walk. As she walks through the streets of Witney, she feels out of place and judgmental about the sad suburban town and the “Pilates girls” who swarm the streets dressed head-to-toe in the same athleisure outfits. She walks past the space that used to be her gallery and feels sad. She is nervous about running into the Watsons—especially Anna, who still resents her for leaving the nanny job. As Megan approaches an underpass, she feels a little chill as she peers into the dark, but she steels herself and walks through.

Later that evening, Scott is late coming home from work. Megan begins feeling jittery and antsy waiting for him to arrive home, so she decides to go out for another walk down the street. As she approaches the underpass again, she hears the train run overhead. As she comes through the other side, she sees a man she knows pass her in his car. He smiles at her through the window.