The Affair. Colette Freedman

      Two hours later, Kathy stepped away from the computer. There was a tightness across her shoulders, and her eyes felt gritty and tired. She had been convinced—absolutely certain—that she would find evidence of Robert’s affair on the machine.

      She hadn’t found what she’d set out to find. There had been no illicit e-mails, no secret dating accounts on Match.com, no concrete evidence. However, what she had discovered had disturbed her. Frightened her even.

      She’d gone for the My Documents folder first, painstakingly and systematically going through folder after folder, reading letters and memos, all to do with business. It left her feeling depressed and a little guilty; she hadn’t quite realized that Robert was working so hard. Nor had she understood just how precarious R&K’s situation was. He’d said nothing to her about the state of the company, but from what she was seeing, while they were not exactly in trouble at the moment, they were certainly heading that way. There seemed to be less business out there, and the independent production companies were constantly undercutting one another simply to get the jobs. He was taking on more and more subcontracting work, most of it funneled through one of the large agencies in the city. She came across one letter to a record label that documented how Robert had been forced to cut nearly three and a half thousand dollars off the quote for a job simply to get the work. She noted that he’d sent out the e-mail at two o’clock in the morning. She discovered other e-mails sent out at two thirty, two forty-five, even three ten in the morning.

      Robert worked late, both in the office and at home. She’d grown used to it over the years. He worked on into the night, claiming that he got his best work done when the house was quiet and the phones had stopped ringing.

      Last night, lying in bed, with visions of that red flag still throbbing in time to the migraine headache behind her eyes, she’d imagined him conducting his affairs by e-mail and phone late at night. Her fears had drifted into fragments of dreams in which she stood outside Robert’s office door, her ear pressed against the cool wood, and heard whispers of intimate conversations, the muted chatter of phone sex, the frantic tapping of his fingers across the keyboard as he sent out erotic e-mails and furtive sexts.

      Yet, there was nothing; she found no evidence of a single untoward letter.

      She’d gone through his Outlook program. She’d read every e-mail he had received and sent. She’d checked his deleted files and his archive folders. And she’d found absolutely no evidence of anything illicit going on. On the contrary, all the evidence pointed to a hardworking and conscientious man. If he was sending e-mails to Stephanie Burroughs, he was obviously using another e-mail account, but she had no way of checking that. She turned to look at the empty space on the table. Unless he kept that data on the laptop. Robert carried the laptop into the office with him every morning and brought it home again every night; maybe it would contain the evidence she was looking for.

      But maybe, just maybe, there was no evidence, the rational side of her brain insisted. Maybe the few scraps of paper she had collected so far were all that would be available. Maybe there were even reasonable explanations for all of them. No, there were too many maybes.

      She sat back down at the desk and blinked her eyes a few times before focussing her attention back on the computer screen. She moved the mouse onto the Contacts section of Outlook and quickly scrolled through the names until she came to the B’s and then slowed.

      Stephanie Burroughs.

      There was a little red flag pinned to the name. She double-clicked on the name, and Stephanie Burroughs’s details opened up. Her name, address, phone number, mobile, e-mail . . . and a little photograph of the woman. Kathy stared long and hard at the picture. It had been six years since she’d last set eyes on her, and if this was a recent photograph—and she suspected that it was—then those years had been kind. A round face was dominated by huge dark eyes and framed by deep brown, almost black hair. Kathy guessed she was now in her early thirties. She imagined that she would still be slim and elegant.

      But what struck her now—as it had struck her all those years ago, when Robert had first introduced them—was how much they resembled one another. They might have been sisters. She had always thought that Stephanie Burroughs was a younger, prettier version of herself. She clicked on the Details tab. It was another page of contact details, including Stephanie’s birthday. The sixth of November. A Scorpio.

      Kathy hit the Print button, and the little laser printer whirred to life, and almost immediately the page of Stephanie’s details whirred out of the machine. She added it to the rest of her evidence.

      She went to the Calendar page. It was a mirror of the calendar she had seen on his phone, and she realized that the programs on the computer and in his phone were probably synched. The same flags appeared on the same days. She scrolled back to the month of November, looking for the sixth, Stephanie’s birthday. There was a little red flag pinned to the day, and a single notation: NYC.

      New York City.

      Kathy remembered the day now: Robert had taken the train down to New York to meet with a potential client. He’d been due back that night, but had called late in the evening to say that he’d had a few drinks and was going to spend the night. The following day, which was a Thursday, he’d phoned to say that he was going golfing on Long Island with the client and would not be back until Friday morning. He had finally arrived home late Friday evening.

      Kathy sat back in the creaking chair and stared at the screen, remembering. There had been a lot of meetings over the years. A lot of overnights in a lot of cities. She’d never thought about it before, but she couldn’t remember if any of those meetings had ever resulted in a new client’s signing up with R&K Productions. In fact, considering what she’d just discovered about the state of the business, she could definitively say that none of these trips with clients had resulted in extra business.

      Which meant . . .

      Which meant that either Robert was a very poor salesman or perhaps this affair had been going on far longer than she had thought. The last she’d heard about Stephanie was that she’d moved away and was working somewhere in Florida. Or had she? Kathy couldn’t even believe that anymore. Had Stephanie left, or had Robert just told her that to lull her into a false sense of security? Had he been seeing her all these years, sneaking off to cities and towns dotted along the East Coast to conduct his sordid affair, meeting his mistress in places where they would be least likely to be recognized? Or had he simply been heading off to—she checked the address on the sheet of paper—to an apartment in Jamaica Plain where Burroughs lived?

      She had no way of knowing. Circumstantial evidence certainly, but no proof.

      Kathy