The Affair. Colette Freedman
of Theresa’s handmade Christmas cards.
Kathy wandered back into the kitchen and automatically cleared the cups from the table. She stood by the sink and ran them under the tap, rather than popping them into the dishwasher. She wanted—needed—to be doing something with her hands.
She glanced at the clock and wondered what time Robert would get home tonight. Then she remembered that he was going to be late; he was meeting a client. A client. Or at least that’s what he had told her. She stopped, frowning. He had said he was taking . . . whom? Jimmy. He was taking Jimmy Moran to Top of the Hub.
Or was he?
“Information, what listing please?”
“Top of the Hub. It’s a restaurant. In the Prudential building.” Her voice surprised her; it sounded strong and confident, loud in the silence of the kitchen. She hadn’t realized she was going to make the call until she found the phone in her hand, her fingers tapping out the number for directory assistance. Isn’t this what suspicious wives around the world did, she thought bitterly: check up on their husbands?
“Please hold and I’ll connect you.”
Didn’t his lie spill out into everyone else’s lives? Friends would lie for him, colleagues would lie, and now here she was, about to add to the fabric of little white lies that surrounded his affair.
“Thank you for calling Top of the Hub. This is Elise. How may I help you?”
“Yes, hello. I’m just calling to confirm a reservation. Robert Walker for this evening, seven thirty. Party of two.” It was her best professional voice, efficient, slightly bored. She’d played the part often enough in the early days when Robert was setting up the production company, pretending to be his secretary in an effort to convince clients that it was more than a one-man, one-woman operation.
“I don’t have a reservation here under Walker.”
Her lips went dry, and her mouth was suddenly filled with cotton. At the corner of her right eye, a muscle began to twitch uncontrollably. “Try R&K Productions.” Once you discovered the first lie, she thought bitterly, the rest followed easily enough.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, nothing under that name either.”
Ma’am. Even over the phone they could tell she was no longer a “miss.” Kathy felt painfully old. “Well, thank you for trying. Let me get back to my boss. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.”
There was no reservation at Top of the Hub. She wasn’t surprised with the discovery; she hadn’t expected that there would be. Of course, it could be a simple mistake on Robert’s part—but Robert rarely made mistakes. Maybe it was a different restaurant.
Or he’d lied to her. And he was meeting his mistress. As he had on every other red flag day.
CHAPTER 7
Kathy Walker stood outside the door to her husband’s study. She rested her hand gently on the doorknob, but hesitated, reluctant to turn the handle and step into his domain.
To cross the boundary, both figuratively and literally.
The events of the past few hours had moved so swiftly that it had left her little time for contemplation. Less than twenty-four hours ago, she’d seen the red flag against that woman’s name on her husband’s phone, and she’d jumped to a conclusion. Maybe she was wrong. Her head desperately tried to convince her heart that maybe it was entirely innocent.
And her heart told her it wasn’t.
She had known, because she had suspected for a long time that something was amiss. And once you suspected, wasn’t that the first indication that something really was wrong? If you knew—truly knew, without question, without hesitation, without doubt—that your partner loved you, you would never suspect him of having an affair. But Kathy wasn’t convinced that Robert loved her anymore. Liked her probably, was used to her certainly, even tolerated her, but loved her? No, she didn’t think so.
When she had seen that red flag, lots of little things, lots of half-formed questions and slightly curious incidents started to form themselves into a convincing truth. And now, for her sanity’s sake, she needed proof.
But once she stepped into his room, once she crossed this line, there was no going back. Even if she found nothing inside, even if she discovered evidence that completely exonerated him, and even though he would never know that she had been searching, things could never be the same between them again. She would be betraying his trust.
He’d betrayed her once.
The thought crept, icy and bitter, into the back of her mind. Betrayed her with the same woman. Or so she believed. She’d had no proof then, no concrete evidence, just fears and suppositions.
And she needed to know the truth.
With no further hesitation, Kathy Walker pushed open the door and stepped into her husband’s study.
It had originally been the second largest bedroom in the house, and at one stage they’d planned on giving it to Brendan when he got older. Robert had claimed it when they first moved into the house, set up his computer and his files, his bookshelves and his computer-editing suite, and even back then she had known Brendan would never get the room.
The room was a perfect square, with a large double window looking out over the back garden. Robert loved it because it was so quiet. A row of filing cabinets took up the left wall, while a drafting table was placed directly in front of the window. Robert preferred to first sketch out the storyboards for his scripts, whether they were for a documentary or an ad, rather than just using a computer program. He felt more creative that way. A custom-built long, blond wood table took up the entire right wall. It held all the office equipment: printers, faxes, scanners, a twenty-seven-inch iMac, and a space where the shiny MacBook Pro laptop usually sat, alongside the digital editing suite where he spliced images, dialogue, and music into the advertisements that were R&K’s bread and butter. When they had first set up the business all those years ago, they had sent everything out for editing. Now, with the advances in technology and the invention of Final Cut Pro, it was possible to do most of the editing in-house on a powerful home computer.
She rarely came into this room—it was very much Robert’s domain—but she was always struck by how incredibly neat it was. It was an aspect of his personality that she found contrasted sharply with the real man. In his daily life and his personal appearance, Robert was always slightly dishevelled, slightly scattered. She’d once thought it was part of his charm. He’d turned up on a date more than once wearing odd socks, and he still had the boyhood habit of incorrectly buttoning his jacket. Lately however—even before she’d become suspicious—she’d been aware that he’d started taking care of his appearance. She’d noticed some new shirts with strong vertical stripes in the closet, along with a couple of new silk ties in bright primary colors to match them. A sharply styled new suit in a dark, Italian wool-silk mix had appeared behind his row of classic Brooks Brothers suits. She remembered the brand: Forzieri. It had sounded so pretentious, and when she had looked it up online later, she discovered that it was. Since when did her husband invest in luxury Italian suits? When she had first met him, his idea of dressing up had been wearing a blazer from the Gap. Recently, he had started getting regular haircuts. It wasn’t that long ago that he’d sat on the edge of the bath while she trimmed his hair with her sewing scissors.
When had these changes started? And why hadn’t she given them a second thought when she first noticed them? Perhaps, because she just hadn’t been paying attention. Or was it that she wasn’t interested?
Kathy stood in the center of the room and looked around. She was looking for something. She just didn’t know what she was looking for. She’d know it when she saw it: It