Unfaithful: An unputdownable and absolutely gripping psychological thriller

by Natalie Barelli

  “I’m very sorry Anna. That’s—”

  But we’re interrupted by Mila. “You are a bit of a dark horse, Anna!” she slurs. She grabs my arm to drag me off. June laughs and waves me away and I get up, glass in hand.

  “I just wanted to say congratulations!”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that.” We clink our glasses. Her gestures are a little exaggerated.

  “I wish you’d said something. I would have loved to help!” she says.

  “I just wanted to wait until I was sure,” I say.

  She wags a finger at me. “You are a bit of a dark horse!” and I say, “Yes, you said that,” and she laughs, congratulates me again. There’s been a lot of congratulations lately but there’s something in her eyes that doesn’t match the smile. For a terrifying moment I think that she suspects something, and my heart leaps into my throat. I try to picture Alex and Mila together, confiding, chatting, plotting, but no, it doesn’t resonate. I don’t think Alex even liked Mila much, anyway. Then I tell myself that I have to stop this second-guessing of everything everyone says to me or I’ll really go crazy.

  Mila lifts her glass of champagne in my direction and says, “You kept it secret so I wouldn’t try to worm it out of you. You think I would have stolen it for myself.” She leans forward again. “You’re right. I would have. Well done, you!”

  Then Geoff appears and puts his arms around both of us.

  “I told Mila to write up a story on you for the website,” Geoff says. “We want a big splash page thing. Photos, quotes, the lot. Did she tell you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Yes,” she says, dully. “What’s a good day for you?” and I see then she doesn’t like that one bit, that Geoff has asked her to do something probably quite mundane in her eyes, and that she thinks it’s a subordinate task. And I want to laugh, because suddenly I see she has lost some of her glow. Geoff has backed the wrong horse—he should have promoted the dark horse, I guess, not the pretty, shiny one. I bet he asks her to take minutes from now on. And if I were unkind, I’d say this is one of the best moments of the night.

  I’m asked to make a speech even though we’ve had many of them already. I rise to the occasion, and I thank my colleagues, the university, my students. Then I thank Luis. I look right at him when I tell the room that the most important thing in my life isn’t mathematics, it’s my family. That I have done this for my husband and especially for my children so that they’d look up to their mom some day, which makes everyone laugh, even though it’s the truth.

  Seventeen

  Word has spread about the Pentti-Stone and I stand in a packed lecture hall staring at faces I’m sure I’ve never seen before. I don’t know if they simply never showed up for class or if they don’t belong here in the first place. Thorn-in-my-side Melanie still managed to stake her place at the front and when our eyes meet, she takes the gum out of her mouth and sticks it on a piece of paper in front of her. That’s a first. Perhaps some of the infinite advantages in winning prizes includes respect.

  I lose some of these first-time attendees though, somewhere between complex analysis and Reimann surfaces. By the time the class ends the sloping lecture hall is dotted with empty seats. It’s actually hard not to feel slighted, that I wasn’t as riveting as all that.

  When the class ends and I return to my office, I run into June in the corridor.

  “Geoff said you asked for extra support.”

  “Yes, I’m a bit overwhelmed with everything since the win.”

  “Well, from now on I’m to assist you with any admin work.” She does a little captain’s call, tipping her hand to her head. I laugh.

  “That’s nice. I’m glad. I’ve actually got a bunch of things for you to do. Let me put it together. You have time this afternoon to go over it with me?”

  She seems pleased. “I certainly do. Name your time.”

  “Okay!”

  “Also, would you like to go for a quick drink after work? Maybe even something to eat?”

  I give her a confused tilt of the head. We’ve never done that before, socialize outside work. She registers my hesitation and gives me a quick, apologetic smile. “But I understand completely if you’re busy at home. It’s just a thought, a spur of the moment—”

  I hesitate for a moment because Luis said last night that his sale fell through. Turns out The Nest is not going to a prestigious institution, and Isabelle was talking out of her proverbial. Part of me thinks I should be there for him. The other part thinks, Screw it. “You know what? I’m not busy, and I would really like that. I’ll call Luis and tell him.”

  “He won’t mind?”

  “No. Trust me, there’s truckloads of dinners ready to be reheated in my freezer. They’ll be fine.”

  She suggests the tapas bar on Jefferson Avenue. It’s close, the food is excellent. “Perfect,” I say, and suddenly I’m really looking forward to a night out with a friend. I haven’t had a friend in a long time. I’ve forgotten how nice it feels. Then Mila appears beside us like something that’s sprung out of a box.

  “Ready?” she asks chirpily. Then turns to June. “I’m interviewing Anna for the website.” June and I make a time to catch up later and Mila and I continue on into my office.

  It’s a brand new office, four times the size of my old one, with lovely windows overlooking the landscaped lawns. Mila makes all the right noises about how nice it is and sits right on the edge of the armchair. I drop loosely into the other one. “Okay, let’s go.” I say. I’m not concerned. I’m lining up lots of these interviews. I even have one coming up with the New York Times for their ‘Profiles in Science’ series. That’s the big one. In comparison, this chat with Mila feels like a walk in the park.

  “Sure. Okay,” she says, pulling out her iPhone and setting it down on the table. “I’m recording this—you don’t mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Okay, good. So, I’d love to know about your process. How long have you been working on the proof?”

  And just like that, my confidence evaporates. I feel ridiculously unprepared and now I want more time. I’ve been so cocky, I think I just assumed this would be a gushing session about how fabulous I am.

  “A year?” I say finally.

  Her eyebrows shoot up. “Wow, is that all?”

  “Oh, okay, I meant, probably three years then?”

  She tilts her head at me. “So what is it? One year or three?”

  “Um. Three, I think.” I could have said, my whole life, and that would be almost true. I think the reason I don’t is because I hate to talk about that time of my childhood, when the Pentti-Stone conjecture represented nothing less than an instrument of torture.

  “Okay.” She writes it down. Then she wants to know why I kept the research secret for so long. I hesitate.

  “Is it because as a woman you were worried you wouldn’t be taken seriously?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I nod, slowly. “That’s very perceptive of you.”

  Then she asks: “Have you some supporting documentation, anything we can upload to the website to accompany your article, and that isn’t in the journal’s paper? Something you held back from Forrester.”

  I cock my head at her. “Supporting documentation?”

  “You know, your notebooks, work in progress, scribbles, doodles, anything you have that would be good visual material for the project. Visuals are great for this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s messy. The messier the better!”

  I rub a finger on my forehead. “Okay, let me think. Um… I don’t actually have much.”

  She chuckles. “But you must have notes. You didn’t publish a pre-print, right?”

  “A pre-print. No.” It’s unusual to publish a proof directly like I did. Normally you’d have a draft version made freely available for others to provide feedback on. I don’t have a pre-print. Obviously. I didn’t need one.

  “I… I threw a lot of things away when I moved office. You know how it is.
I might have thrown my notes, too.”

  She waits for me to say more, a cloud of confusion in her eyes. “But you submitted them to the Forrester Foundation.”

  Something tugs at the edge of my brain when she says that. “What do you mean?”

  She tilts her head at me. “It’s part of the rules. You know that, right? The Forrester Foundation will only award the prize if you submit all the notebooks. You have to show how you came to the solution.”

  “Oh, right!” I blink, breathe a sigh of relief. For a moment I thought she meant… I don’t know what I thought. All I know is, I’ve already done that. I did that when I submitted the paper. “It’s all in the published paper.”

  “Well, not really. Without supporting documentation, notebooks, workings, all that, they won’t give you the prize. I mean, these are the rules, you know that, right?”

  I wish she’d stop asking me that. I laugh. “Of course I know that!” I raise my hand. “You know what, it doesn’t matter. I’ll dig up any relevant notebooks I have and bring them along.”

  But I remember now. An email that came shortly after the Foundation confirmed my solution was accepted, something about sending them documentation. I ignored it, I don’t know why. I thought it was for their records or something. Now I wait until she’s gone to pore over the fine print on the Foundation’s website. And there it is. The submission must include the preliminary work that led to the discovery. Then a paragraph detailing what’s acceptable in terms of documentation.

  I sit back. Push the palm of my hand between my eyes. I have a vague memory of knowing about this requirement, but I didn’t think it was compulsory. Did Alex and I ever discuss this? Of course one requirement was that a paper be published about the solution in a reputable journal, and I’ve done that, and that’s enough, surely. Who cares how I got there?

  It was stupid of me to destroy the notebooks. I should have copied them first, so I’d have the workings in my own handwriting. I could have added rings from overflowing coffee cups, spilled red wine. Make it look like I’d been working late at night.

  I wasn’t thinking straight back then. Never mind. It will be fine. Of course it will be. They wouldn’t have said I’d won the Pentti-Stone otherwise. I’m sure this so-called requirement is not absolute. I mean, I solved it, didn’t I? The whole world knows I solved it. They could hardly not give me the prize! And if they ask, I’ll just say… something. I’ll think of something. It’ll be fine.

  The tapas bar isn’t very far and June and I decide to walk. We’re almost there when the weather changes abruptly and we wrap our coats tighter, raise our collars and squint against the icy wind. I take her hand to hurry her along and we almost fall into the restaurant, laughing, our cheeks red and our coats sparkling with melting crystals.

  It’s early enough to score a good table near the window. We drop ourselves on the hard wooden bench, rub our hands together and immediately order margaritas with lime juice and dry orange Curaçao. They arrive in jam jars while we scan the menu. Conversation flows, we find ourselves on a new level of friendship. I’ve asked her before about her personal life but she’s always been cagey. “I’m not in relationship, not anymore anyway,” she said. “Trevor. That’s his name. We were together for years, and eighteen months ago I found out he was seeing my best friend behind my back. That’s why I moved away and ended up here. New beginnings and all that. And the rent is cheap here.”

  “I’m sorry, June. That really sucks.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting over it. Tell me about your mother.” She rests her elbows on the table, hands knotted together.

  I cock my head at her. “You want to know about my mother?” I rub my eye, unwind the scarf I’m still wearing around my neck and fold it on the bench beside me. “Okay, I’ll tell you about her.” I cross my arms on the table. “The best way to explain my mother is to tell you about my friend Hope.”

  I take a sip of my drink. “I grew up in Youngstown and it was there, in middle school, that Hope arrived one morning, in the middle of term. As soon as I saw her sitting at her desk that day, I wanted to get to know her. It was like, friendship at first sight. She looked sweet, kind, with curly blonde hair, almost red, and she had chipped pink nail polish.

  “Our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, asked for a volunteer to look after our new classmate, show her around, that sort of thing. I couldn’t raise my hand fast enough. I’d do it, absolutely. ‘You can count on me Mrs. Johnson,’ I said.

  “I’d never had a real friend until Hope. Her parents were hippies who made clothes out of ethically grown cotton and sold them at markets and in local stores. I loved to hang out at her house, so much so that I was there all the time. It was warm and comfortable and even the furniture was welcoming, with its soft shapes you could sink into and its bright, happy colors. My parents didn’t care about making a home, let alone a welcoming one. They were too busy, and probably in some weird way thought it was beneath them, anyway. They worked, like, all the time. Even when they weren’t working, they were working. As a result, my house was spartan and neglected. Sometimes when they went out I would pull out the vacuum cleaner from under the stairs and clean the living room to within an inch of its life. I’d squeeze lemons into a cup of water and dip my fingers in, flicking droplets over the carpet so that my house would smell like Hope’s house—which it never did. I even made cushions once, with some fabric Hope’s mother gave me, red with big blue and green flowers. My parents didn’t notice. When I pointed this out to them, my parents looked around mildly bewildered and muttered something like, ‘very nice’.

  “At Hope’s house, we’d sit on bean bags in her room and listen to Michael Jackson. She showed me her parents’ stash of pot once. ‘Smell that,’ she said. I thought it smelt like rotting mushrooms, which possibly wasn’t far from the truth. We’d talk about what we would do when we grew up, kind of like what Luis and I would do years later in college.

  “But there was my mother. She disapproved, obviously, eventually, once she took the time to notice. Sometimes I think she simply didn’t like seeing me happy. That it went against her grain. I should be studying instead, or something.

  “‘It’s okay, you’re rebelling. It’s what most girls your age do,’ she’d said. And I remember thinking, I’m thirteen years old. I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mother.”

  “So what happened?” June asks.

  “It was almost summer. Hope had her fourteenth birthday party at her house. It was a Saturday afternoon, and my mother forbade me to go, but Hope helped me sneak out through my bedroom window. I was probably there for only an hour before my mother came to get me.” I bury my face in my hands and groan. “You should have seen her. It was the most embarrassing day of my life. Hope’s mother tried to coax her to stay—there were other parents there enjoying the party—and she offered her a glass of something that she’d poured from a large glass pitcher that had floating bits of fruit in it. But my mother stood there, her face white with fury, her lips pressed together into a thin line. She saw me, marched over and yanked me away. And that was it. I was grounded for the rest of the year.”

  June jerks back in shock. “The year?”

  I nod. “She found a project for me. A mathematics project.”

  “What?”

  “The Pentti-Stone conjecture.” I take a swig of my drink.

  “I don’t really know what that means, Anna.”

  “It was to punish me for disobeying her. Although I’m sure she’d argue it was for my own education. But after that party, my mother declared that I was too possessive in my friendships and it was unhealthy. I wasn’t, by the way, June. I really believe I was just a normal child, but she insisted I needed a distraction from my distractions. Next thing I know, she announced that we would solve the Pentti-Stone conjecture. I say ‘we’ because she was going to do it with me. She thought it would be… I don’t know. Fun, I guess. Her idea of mother–daughter bonding. Except that I did all the work. Her only contributi
on was to check on my progress. She’d come into my bedroom and pick up my work, go over it, maybe ask me a question or two. Sometimes I thought I was on the right track and I’d say to her, ‘Is it right? Would that work?’ But she’d just shake her head. ‘No. That’s not going to work,’ she’d say. Then she’d take my pen from me, put a diagonal line through the page and give me the notebook back. ‘Try again,’ she’d say, and I would cry myself to sleep. It felt so hopeless. I was never going to get it. I was locked up all summer. Every day. I missed Hope so much, I used to dream about her. I fantasized that she was trying to find ways to get me out, that we’d run away! Even after we went back to school the following term, I was locked up every weekend—metaphorically speaking of course, but still—in my room poring over it, trying to come up with a proof just so I could get out and play. Until then, no movies for me, no dances, no hanging out after school playing by the lake with my friends. Not that I had many of those to begin with.” I poke at an anchovy with my fork. “I was thirteen years old. Grown men and women had spent years trying to solve that thing. My dad just pretended it wasn’t happening. He deferred to my mother in every way anyway, a life-long habit he was not going to break, not even for his daughter’s welfare.” I feel a prickle of tears. I grab a napkin and press it against my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m getting upset,” I say. “It’s a long time ago.” The restaurant suddenly feels uncomfortably hot. I scrunch up the napkin into a ball. “It should go without saying I grew to loathe the Pentti-Stone conjecture. I still do. So you can imagine when Alex came to me with—”

  I stop, leave the words hanging in the air. I want them to float away but they’re still there, between us. I can’t think of anything to say, and I look at June pleadingly, my mouth opening and closing like a fish.

  “When Alex what?” June prompts. But she doesn’t frown or narrow her eyes and there’s no suspicion or shock in her tone, or anything to indicate I said the wrong thing. I feel my insides loosen and I shake my head. “Nothing,” I finally reply. “Ignore me. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. Hey, shall we get another margarita?”