He's got it coming: Love is the best revenge

by Alexandra Winter

  34

  “You’re lying. Isac didn’t have a woman with him. He was coming home from a work trip.” I try my best to block out the image of my husband with another woman. “He was nothing like you.”

  Henrik’s arms rise, his palms up. “I’m not lying.”

  There was no other woman! My husband was not cheating on me!

  I’m shivering from the fear growing inside me.

  I have to get into the hospital records to know for sure. If you’re telling me the truth, she should be registered for a leg injury.

  Henrik frowns. “I thought you asked me to come over to discuss my proposal. Was the real reason to know what happened when your husband crashed?”

  “No.” I lift the knife toward Henrik. The image of him darkens as dizziness consumes me. As if he’s behind a fish-eye lens, my vision starts to obscure. I close my eyes and clutch the knife. My nails dig into my palm, desperate to snap myself out of insanity. “I wanted you to confess to killing him.”

  I don’t care about your proposal or your feelings. I’ve given up everything to avenge Isac. Now you tell me he was cheating on me?

  When I open them, Henrik has backed up to the front door with his shoes and coat on. His jaw clenches and his eyes are filled with tears. “Did you…” He swallows. “Did you just date me to figure out what happened to your husband?”

  I’ve looked forward to this day for so long, but this is wrong. The knife drops to the floor, the tip stuck in the hardwood floor, swaying like a metronome about to count out its final beat.

  “I dated you to avenge him.”

  Henrik opens the door to leave. Halfway out, he stops. “I’m sorry you didn’t ask me about this on our first date. I could have told you what happened, the truth. And we wouldn’t have ended up here.”

  There is no uncertainty in his voice, no lies. I gasp for air as it sinks in that there’s a chance he didn’t cause Isac’s death. I’ve avenged a lie, martyred myself for a cause that never was.

  I call after him. “You didn’t know what truth was when I met you!”

  The door smacks shut.

  Shit.

  My hand is on the door handle, ready to pull it open, run after Henrik, but why?

  I’ve shattered my morals and ruined the person I was. But I would have known if Isac was cheating. Cecilia told me so herself, I would know.

  Henrik is not my concern, and I shouldn’t care about him. He’s a liar.

  I run to the office to find a way into the hospital’s records. Hacking a hospital is risky, like a bank, but as usual, I’m using Henrik’s computer information. If anyone snoops around, it’ll look like it was Henrik breaking the law.

  When the hospital’s log-in page appears, I stop.

  Shit. If he’s telling the truth. If Henrik didn’t cause Isac’s death, but instead tried to help, and drove that woman…

  I can’t even think about Isac cheating on me. He wouldn’t. He’s not like Henrik or other pathetic, despicable, cheating men out there. Henrik was sick to contrive something like this. Isac was perfect.

  I disconnect and start over from my own computer, but go via several VPN addresses to confuse the police or anyone else looking for an electronic trail. It appears my laptop is in several addresses in Oslo to remove any suspicion at first glance. I add VPNs via India, Pakistan, USA, and New Zealand and continue until I have at least twenty countries covered. After several hours, I’m still not inside the hospital’s records when my doorbell rings.

  It’s probably Cecilia.

  She’s rushed over here every time I’ve needed her, and if there’s one time I need her help, it’s now.

  My head is pounding as I remove myself from the office and answer the intercom.

  “Hi,” Henrik says.

  “Did you forget something?” My clock on the wall shows eight o’clock in the morning the following day. Preoccupied with finding a way into the hospital’s records, I haven’t noticed the time fly by.

  No wonder my head hurts like hell.

  “Let’s talk,” he says.

  For months I’ve hated him, schemed, and used him like he’s used other women, perhaps done worse, since I wanted him dead. But I lack information. If what he told me is true, he has details of what happened. I need answers. Maybe he knows the woman’s name if she was, in fact, there.

  When I don’t respond, he clears his throat. “I come in peace. Please let me in, it’s freezing out here.”

  If he’s lying, I have to let him in, make sure he can’t escape.

  I buzz the door open and unlock my front door.

  I don’t want to talk to him, at least not until I have access to the hospital files. “I’m busy.”

  “I’ll be in the kitchen making us breakfast.” Henrik removes his shoes and coat.

  Breakfast?

  “No. Don’t do that.” I push my palms out towards him, signaling for him to stay put. “Just stay here.”

  While I get to the bottom of this.

  If he’s innocent, knowing how I’ve treated him, I can’t have him here cooking for me, caring about me. If what he said is true, he should hate me for what I’ve done, not care for me.

  A faint smile stretches across Henrik’s lips. “I’m hungry, and knowing you…” He stops himself, pushes my arms aside, and strokes his thumbs underneath my eyes. “…just like me, you haven’t eaten or slept since I was here yesterday.”

  He’s right, of course. “Call if you need anything.” I run back upstairs before I can change my mind. Hearing him rooting around in my kitchen assures me I won’t. Not unless I prove that he’s lying.

  An hour later, I stop hammering the keyboard at a creak on the stairs. Footsteps close in. I turn to shut the door to the office when Henrik’s face peeks around the corner. “Are you hungry?” His jaw drops seeing the walls covered in his profiles, images inside his home, everyone he’s dated the last two years, and lists and conversations from his chats.

  He takes a small step inside, unable to look away. Stops, take another step as if needing both time and space to take it in.

  I keep an eye on him in my peripheral vision while I pretend to continue working.

  His eyes are empty, blank, and open. “You really hated me.” He walks over to the wall and studies the research.

  I ignore his comment and continue trying to find a way in. Either I’m too upset or tired for my brain to work as it should, or the hospital has protected itself more than any other hospital I’ve ever come across.

  Henrik studies every sheet of information on the wall. He stops at Katelyn’s column. “While I was texting other women, traveling with Katelyn...shit, you knew everything.”

  My lips pull in. “Mhmm.”

  “This isn’t legal.” He plucks the map I’ve made of places he spent the night while dating me, covering Katelyn’s apartment, their travels, Unstad. “Don’t you care that I slept with her?”

  “I care more that you made me promise to not sleep with other men while you continued sleeping with her.”

  Henrik plucks the photo from his vacation to Italy from the wall. Her foot’s shadow is in the lower corner. “My heart stopped when I realized you knew I wasn’t alone. I panicked.”

  “Good.” I direct my focus back to the computer screen.

  “If I thought you loved me, she would have been gone long before she was.”

  Like a piano master punching the wrong key, spewing a sour note out at the audience, I write a “c” instead of a “<,” then raise my hands from the keyboard. “Bullshit. I did convince you.”

  “No. When I returned to the cabin, frozen to the bone, and you took care of me, that’s when I could tell you loved me. Until then, I always felt like you were closing a part of yourself off from me. Now I know why.”

  “Stop talking, I have to concentrate.” I dive back into hacking the hospital records.

  Henrik tapes the image back but hovers in the area where the information about his brother and father hangs. He
reads their information and frowns when he sees the area on the wall where I removed his mother’s information.

  I should have hung a note saying she died when he was five or something to let him see that I have information about her.

  “For a second, I hoped you’d found something I didn’t know about my mother,” he says.

  I want to tell him, but it’s not the right time. “Wouldn’t that be great.” Avoiding sharing what I know gives me a headache, but I have to get into the hospital’s records and prove Henrik wrong. Telling him now will only lead to questions I don’t have time to answer.

  “Don’t you risk going to jail for this?” He takes a step back to take it all in, grinning to himself as if finding it hilarious that I do risk going to jail for this. “It’s a lot of research. When I proposed, I said that you knew me. You really do.”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  The way he’s stealing glances at me and grinning is infectious. “Stop smiling. Go away, you’re distracting me.” I make sweeping motions with my hands to get him out.

  But he doesn’t move.

  A message appears on my screen. In the lower right-hand corner is the symbol of a whale’s tail, and the message contains the code I need to crack into the hospital’s records.

  Knowing Cecilia is monitoring my activity calms me. With Henrik here, she hears and sees everything that’s going on. She didn’t show up at my door this time, but she did show up for me.

  The code gets me through their security, allowing me access to every file registered. I search the date, December 14, 2017. I scroll from the morning, where mainly older people stopped by the hospital to children during the day. But at ten to eight that evening, a woman was checked in for a leg injury resembling what Henrik disclosed. Runa Auset. Her hair is black and long, her eyes brown, and she looks more voluptuous than me.

  “Is this her?” I turn the screen to Henrik, and his jaw drops.

  “Yes, that’s her. How did you…?”

  He’s got to be lying. There must be another reason why she was in Isac’s car.

  Henrik pulls up the chair that Cecilia always used, sits, and leans his elbows on his knees. “What will you do? Hack this Runa? Then what? Make her love you too?”

  “Pfff. Of course not. It’s never the lover’s fault.” I bury my face in my hands and mumble. “Isac didn’t have an affair. I would have known.”

  Henrik walks out into the hallway. “Food’s ready when you are.” Then he leaves.

  I listen to his steps until they reach the floor downstairs.

  I’ve promised myself to never hack Isac’s phone or laptop, but he’s no longer here.

  I find the box with his belongings and dig out his last phone and laptop. It doesn’t take me long to have his phone open. But I don’t find anything about Runa.

  He knows who he’s married to and would hide it well.

  I press his apps to see if they are real or a cover for other images. On the third page, I go into his games folder and press an app for what appears to be a game with the letter R in comic font. Opening it is like a slap in the face. Isac and Runa smile at the camera in a tight embrace. I check the date. December 2014. She was with him on his work trip. Not only were they having an affair, but they had been dating for a year before the crash. The last photo is a selfie in bed from his last work trip.

  I grab his phone and laptop and bring them back into the guest room. About to put them gently back in the box, I snap and smash them both on the floor.

  Cecilia couldn’t believe I hadn’t hacked him when I told her I’d promised never to do so earlier. Now I wish I had.

  I close my eyes to control my body and swallow several times to make the tears stop. But they don’t, and neither does the image of her face, her nude lipstick, and that black hair.

  “Are you all right?” Henrik calls up to me.

  I lift the phone. The screen is cracked, but I scroll through his phone log where one number repeats itself, Robert A., saved with a picture of a golf ball on a red peg. I press the Facebook app. Isac had over two thousand friends. Runa was one of them. Most profile images are selfies of her, but one stands out from a golf course with a ball on a red peg and her ready to strike.

  I flip back to the phone log. It’s the same peg.

  My finger hovers over the ‘call’ button. Isac’s status on Facebook showed we were married. She knew about me, like I knew about Katelyn, and Thea, and everyone else.

  My body jerks. I run to the bathroom, unable to lift the toilet lid in time. I spin around and hurl into the sink.

  Fast footsteps stamp up the stairs. Before I have time to shut the door, Henrik is behind me, holding my hair and running the water. Tears flood my eyes, and I have no control as I hurl again and again. Henrik doesn’t speak, but pats my forehead with a damp towel, and keeps my hair back.

  When there’s nothing but green stomach acid dripping from my lips, I force water down, grateful it stays.

  “I should have known.” I push the words out between sniffles.

  Henrik wets the towel again in cold water and pats my cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  The cooling cloth soothes me.

  “No, you’re not.” I pinch my lips shut.

  He was telling the truth. He didn’t kill Isac. He helped his lover survive.

  I wipe my eyes, my voice shaking. “I wanted to kill you.”

  If Cecilia hadn’t connected us on Tinder, I probably would have after finding that photo.

  “You thought I killed your husband. I hope you’ve changed your mind now. You know I didn’t.”

  “You hope?”

  He puts his arms around me and pulls me into his chest. It’s soft, and my breathing slows as my body relaxes. “I know you love me,” he whispers.

  I tighten my grip, allowing my tears to soak his sweater. “I can’t do this.”

  He stiffens as if I’ve hit him, and he’s contemplating how to react. But as though he doesn’t believe me, he pulls me closer.

  I release him and see tears in his eyes. “Are you crying?”

  “I should probably be angry, and I am in a way feeling betrayed, but I get it, and I don’t want to lose you. I love you.” He wipes them dry with his hand. “It’s too fast for me. Let me stay the night, be here for you, fall asleep with you in my arms.”

  Henrik turns off the running water, hangs the towel on the edge of the sink, and starts the shower for me. “Breakfast is ready.” He leaves me alone in the bathroom, where I’m filled with so many emotions that I go numb. Just like a computer that overheats and dies, I’ve over-felt and feel like I’m in shock.

  I shower and brush my teeth before meeting Henrik downstairs for breakfast. A concoction of hot candles, warm bread, and fresh coffee reminds me of Sunday mornings, freedom.

  He’s lit candles on the dining table, in the kitchen, and on the sofa table. In the background relaxing piano music plays.

  It feels like a scene from a movie where I’m leaving hell and entering a picture-perfect scene. If I were a one-dimensional character, I’d be thrilled because Henrik has made me breakfast, and all my worries are gone.

  I grab mugs from the cupboard. “Why do you want to stay?”

  Are you thinking about having one last night of sex? Because if you are, you’re deluded.

  Thinking back to our first night together, after four hours of effort to make him orgasm, my lips purse in aggravation over his manipulating ways. “You’ll trick me again. Like you fooled me to fall asleep entangled in you because of your breathing strategy.”

  He places the bread on a chopping board next to a knife and brings it to the table.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I looked it up. It’s in your book. How you connected and synchronized your breathing to mine, fooling my body into subconsciously feeling safe and relaxed.” I remove the foam from my French press to take out the bitterness of the coffee and push the filter down.

  “Your breathing is impossible to foll
ow without passing out myself.” He laughs. “I almost fainted trying.”

  “When did you stop?” I have to know if what I felt was a trick or if it was real, if I relaxed in his arms, sleeping with my forehead on his because it was right.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Think!” It blurts out of me more demanding than I intended. “I’m sorry. It’s just…I’ve never been able to fall asleep that close to anyone before, not even Isac. It was too warm. I’ve always wiggled away, desperate to sleep alone.”

  “I gave up during sex. Never did it again after that first night.”

  “What do you mean you gave up? And how on earth could you follow my breathing during sex? We weren’t even that close.”

  Henrik adds glasses and water to the table setting. “When we started, I was on top of you, so it was easy for me to see your chest move. It was impossible to follow it, though.”

  I frown. “I don’t believe you. You must have used that trick to make me fall asleep so close to you. My forehead on yours. That’s not natural.”

  “It was with us. It was a first for me, too, and I’ll miss it. But I never tried to trick you like that after we first had sex.” He shrugs. “You told me you wanted to kill me. I feel bad for saying it when you’re going through what you are. But losing you feels worse than death.”

  I haven’t noticed until now that he’s rearranged the table placement, so we both overlook the windows leading out to the road where underneath the lamppost snow trickles from the sky, like glitter falling after the final curtain falls.

  I take a slice of the loaf and rip off a piece. If he’s telling the truth, that means I actually pulled my goal off. He imagines a future with me, and he is heartbroken.

  “The night Cecilia convinced me to date you, I intended to end my life.” I rip off another bite, fighting back my tears, unsure why I’m sharing this.

  Henrik has put a huge bite in his mouth but stops chewing.

  Taking a deep breath, I exhale slowly to get the words out. “I had everything ready. If Cecilia had rung my doorbell twenty minutes later, I wouldn’t be here now.”