The Woman At The Door

by Daniel Hurst

  “Forget about him. You’re not meant to be together.”

  “She’s not worth it. There’s someone else out there for you.”

  “Unrequited love is the worst. I’m going through the same thing too. I wish I could help.”

  It seemed like this was a big problem in society, but more importantly, it seemed like there was nobody out there who was solving it. The advice of “move on and forget about them” was not very helpful to somebody in love. They didn’t want to move on. They wanted to be happy.

  And to be happy, they needed the other person.

  Having seen this ‘gap in the market’, I had begun to drop myself into these online conversations and provide my own pearls of wisdom. But instead of letting people down gently with token platitudes, I made it clear that there was another option.

  I said that the problem was the other man or woman that the subjects were married to.

  If they were out of the equation, anything could happen.

  It started with one client, as all businesses do. A woman sent me a private message on one of the forums after seeing my group posts, and she asked me what I meant by them. That was when I told her that I had conceived a system that gave people like her a chance with the person they wanted to be with.

  I started out by only charging a little. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was going to work on demand, after all. But it did. I knew I had something when I got a message from that same woman a few months later telling me that she was now dating the man she desired after he had left his wife due to accusations of cheating levelled against her by me.

  My system worked.

  It needed ironing out, but it worked.

  Thus, my business was born.

  But I already knew that because I had tried it before that first customer. I had tried it in my personal life. How do you think I came to be online browsing forums about unrequited love in the first place?

  I knew what it was like to want somebody that I couldn’t have.

  I also knew the kind of things that needed to be done to get them.

  21

  REBECCA

  It’s Saturday night, but this is no longer my favourite night of the week. That’s because it doesn’t consist of any of the things that it used to. There’s no takeaway on the sofa. There’s no movie on the TV. And there’s no Sam sitting beside me laughing.

  There’s just me, alone in the house, with nothing to do but worry.

  I told my husband that I needed some space last night during our ill-fated meal with Ally and Phil. He was shocked when I told him that, but I had to say it because it’s the truth. I do need space. I need to think about things, and I can’t do that with him around because it’s only making me more confused. Sam assumed it was just going to be a one night thing and that he would be able to come back home today. But I told him that I needed more time than that, which is why he has taken a few more of his things and gone back to his hotel.

  Just like me, he is going to be spending Saturday night alone.

  At least I assume he is.

  Who knows what he will really be up to?

  I’m standing by the toaster, waiting for my bread to pop up because this is all I’m having for dinner tonight. I could have got a takeaway even though I’m on my own, but I’m not in the mood for it. I just want to eat enough to keep me going and then climb into bed and close my eyes. This is not what weekends are about, and I hope this is not what they will be like in the future, but for now, I’m on my lonesome, and I have to get on with it. Ally had offered to come around and have a glass of wine with me tonight, offering me support and giving me a chance to get more things off my chest regarding my problems with Sam. But I politely put her off, telling her that I’ll see her one night in the week for a catch-up. That’s because it might not do me much good to have someone else’s input into my affairs at this time.

  I need to figure this out for myself.

  The bread pops up looking much crisper than it did a minute ago, so I scoop it out of the toaster onto a plate and carry it out of the room, along with my cup of tea. I’m heading for the bedroom where I will eat my meagre meal before turning off the lights and thinking about things under the cover of darkness. I like to believe that I do my best thinking during the night when everything is quiet and still. Let’s hope so because I need to come to a decision soon on what I am going to do going forward.

  Am I going to let Sam back home and, in effect, say that I believe him when he tells me that the woman at the door and the lipstick on the collar had nothing to do with him?

  Or am I going to start trusting my gut instinct which tells me that something is wrong and that my husband might not be the perfect man that I thought he was?

  Walking into the bedroom, I put my plate and cup down on the bedside table before getting onto the bed and pulling the duvet up over me. It’s not even eight o’clock, and I’m already tucked up for the night, but I don’t care. I’m entitled to do what I want after the week I have had. From the woman at the door to the near-miss on site to the lipstick on Sam’s shirt and the embarrassing argument in front of my best friend, it’s been the week from hell.

  If I can’t have an early night now, when can I?

  I must be hungrier than I thought because I eat the toast in no time, and the tea is gone quickly as well. I think about getting up and making more, but I decide not to bother. Instead, I just reach over for the lamp on the bedside table and turn it off.

  Now the bedroom is dark, and I can close my eyes and try and get some rest.

  As I lie there alone in my bed with my husband several miles away in a hotel room, I think back over our relationship all the way from when we met to this present day. All the dates, from the first few when we were nervous to the later ones when we were far more comfortable with each other. All the text messages, from the flirty ones in the beginning to the more mundane ones after that when we chatted less about sex and more about who would be home first to put the dinner on. All the conversations we had, from the light-hearted and insignificant to the more serious ones where we discussed deep feelings and our plans for the future.

  Then there were all the happy times, like the holidays, the nights out and the Sunday mornings in bed spent wrapped up in each other’s arms. There were the sadder times, like when Sam’s parents passed away and I had to keep him strong during the funerals as he bravely plodded on with life. And there were the truly magical times, like our wedding day and the honeymoon we went on after when we were both glowing from the occasion and feeling content in the knowledge that we had found our one true partner for life.

  But it’s not just the old times I’m missing now that things have changed. I feel sad for the future times that might not happen now. Getting older together. Celebrating the progression of our respective careers together. Going on holiday together. Spending Saturday nights in front of the TV together.

  Just being together in general.

  I can’t imagine my life without Sam in it.

  I thought he felt the same way as I did. I thought he needed me as much as I needed him. But he can’t do. Not if he won’t be honest with me. He has to know how that lipstick came to be on his shirt, just like he has to know what that woman was talking about when she came to our door this time last week. These things that have happened can’t be random or coincidental. They have to mean something, and maybe it’s obvious what that thing is.

  They mean that my husband has potentially cheated on me while we have been together.

  Sam says it isn’t so.

  But that woman said otherwise.

  I know my husband is determined to find out who she is. He has even told me that he has hired a private investigator to look into her. I would like to know too. I want to know who she is and why she came to my house.

  I want to know if it was her lipstick on his shirt.

  Even if it was true and she slept with Sam, why did she tell me? To get back at him? If so, why? Did he tell her that he was g
oing to leave me but went back on that vow, leaving her angry and vengeful? Or was she just trying to do me a favour by giving me a warning and letting me know that the man I love isn’t as innocent as I think he is?

  But I don’t know why she would feel like she owes me anything. Perhaps she feels guilty about what she did with a married man. Maybe it was her way of easing her conscience.

  I just wish Sam would explain all of this, telling me who that woman was and how there is a perfectly good explanation for her appearance. I also want him to explain the lipstick. Give me some reason to think that it got on his shirt innocently and not because he was getting up close and personal with another woman. But he’s so stubborn, and he won’t do that. He just keeps telling me that he has done nothing wrong. He even said today that he should be innocent until proven guilty, as if he was some suspect in a crime drama on TV, making the detectives do all the work to bring him down. It was almost as if he was putting the onus on me to prove he had strayed rather than having the onus on him to prove that he hadn’t. But there is evidence. The woman. The lipstick. It might not be concrete evidence, but it is still evidence, all the same, so therefore he is a suspect. I just don’t want to play the detective. I want him to make it easy for me and come clean.

  No more interrogations. Just confess. Tell the truth.

  Maybe it will break my heart. Maybe it will be the worst thing to hear. But maybe I have to hear it.

  Maybe my marriage is over, and maybe I have been a fool.

  Maybe.

  It’s all maybes, and I don’t like them. I want solid, irrefutable facts. How do I get them? Perhaps I should take a leaf out of my husband’s book and hire a private investigator.

  He has hired one to look into that woman.

  Maybe I should hire one to look into him.

  How’s that for a maybe?

  22

  SAM

  It’s been a busy start to the weekend and a very unpredictable one. It began with Rebecca telling me to give her some space on Friday night, and it got even weirder when I sat down in a cafe with a private investigator over a cup of coffee on Saturday lunchtime. But before I attended that meeting, I had to pay a visit to Steve’s house in the hope that my neighbour would be able to hand me the footage of the woman that I needed in order to give the PI something to work with.

  I’d been anxious when I had knocked on Steve’s front door and not just because I needed a favour from him. It was because I was so close to my own house, the house I had been told that I wasn’t welcome at for the time being. I’d been nervous about Rebecca looking out of the window and seeing me there in case she thought I was loitering around, which is a ridiculous thing to worry about because why should I not be allowed to loiter around near my own home if I wanted to? But I didn’t see Rebecca at the window, and I was able to get into Steve’s house when he opened the door and begrudgingly agreed to give me the footage of the woman.

  With that evidence in my possession, I was able to attend the lunchtime meeting with the PI who had responded to my email, and that was where my crazy week got even crazier. I’m not sure what I had been expecting when I turned up to meet the PI for the first time. Someone in a long coat and hat perhaps, with dark sunglasses covering their eyes and a shifty demeanour as they went about their business hoping that nobody would recognise them? I certainly hadn’t been expecting what I got, which was a mousey-haired middle-aged woman who looked more like a librarian than a private investigator.

  I knew she was the person I was supposed to meet because she had sent me a text message just before our scheduled meeting time telling me that there would be a red handbag on one of the tables in the cafe, which would be how I was to know where to sit. I had walked into the cafe at noon and seen the red handbag, as well as the woman sitting in front of it, and that was how our meeting had begun.

  She told me that her name was Erica, but I had no way of knowing if it was her real name or not because I wasn’t going to ask her for I.D. It could have been a pseudonym to keep her real identity a secret, or she could have been perfectly honest. Her job wasn’t illegal, so she had no reason to be secretive, but the success of her job did lend itself to being discreet, so who knows? Maybe she was being honest with me, or maybe she was not. But it didn’t matter. The important thing was that I was as open and honest with her as possible as I told her my problem and how I hoped that she could solve it for me.

  I told her about the woman at the door and the lie she spoke to my wife that I wasn’t able to explain. I told her about the footage my neighbour had of the woman as she walked away from our house that night. And I told her that my wife was now paranoid about whether or not I had been cheating on her and that things had come to a head after the discovery of some lipstick on my shirt, which I couldn’t explain either, so I was now staying in a hotel to give her a break.

  It felt weird to be talking about myself so openly to a complete stranger, but I did my best to give Erica as clear a picture as possible about what has happened to me because that would be the best way that she might be able to help. The PI had recorded everything I had said on a tape recorder that had sat in the middle of the table between us, and while I wasn’t sure how good the sound quality would be considering we were sat in the middle of a busy cafe, I had to assume she knew what she was doing. I certainly hoped she did when she gave me her fee a few minutes later.

  Erica wanted me to give her £1000 if she was successful with tracking down this mystery woman.

  I had initially baulked at the hefty figure she had quoted me and made a comment about how I might have to do some “shopping around” to see if I could find a PI that wasn’t quite as pricey. But Erica had assured me that her fee was more than fair and actually quite cheap considering how much work she was going to have to do in finding the woman based on all I had given her to go on.

  I had sipped my coffee and deliberated over my decision for a few minutes, but in the end, I decided to go for it because what did I have to lose? I only had to pay Erica if she found this woman, and if she did that then it was potentially going to save my marriage, so it would be money well spent. The other option was not to spend the money and keep paying for a damn hotel room while my wife kept doubting me and thinking I had been up to no good behind her back.

  My meeting with Erica had ended when the PI had taken the footage from Steve’s CCTV camera and told me that she would be in touch if and when she had something that could help. I had asked her how long that was likely to be, but she couldn’t give me a definite answer. She told me that in her line of work, it was difficult to put deadlines on things, and I suppose I can understand that. But I did ask her what she was planning to do to start tracking the woman down, although she didn’t tell me. She just said she had her methods and they had worked before, so she was confident that they would work again. And on that mysterious note, she had turned and walked away out of the coffee shop, leaving me to wonder what the hell she was going to do at my expense.

  After the covert meeting had ended, I had called round at my house to pick up a few more things to keep me going in my new life as an estranged husband living out of a hotel room. Rebecca had been home, but she hadn’t been very chatty and not at all engaging when I had tried to get her to sit down and give me another chance to plead my innocence. She said she still needed more time and that unless I could give her answers about the woman and the lipstick, I would need to make myself comfortable at that hotel.

  I had brought up the meeting with the PI and hoped that might go some way to proving how serious I was about uncovering the truth. I even told her that I was willing to spend £1000 if necessary to find out who that woman was and why she had lied. Rebecca had seemed a little shocked by that price tag, as I had been the first time that I had heard it, but she still hadn’t accepted that I was innocent in all of this. If she had done then I would have been at home now lying on my own bed instead of on this one right here. The mattress is lumpy, the pillow is as flat as a p
ancake, and it really isn’t worth the £47 a night that I’m paying for the privilege of sleeping on it. But it’s very cheap, and that’s important because I need to save all the money I can so I can pay the PI to get me out of here and back in my house where I belong.

  Do I feel betrayed that Rebecca doesn’t believe me? Yes, it would be impossible not to feel hurt about it. She should trust me implicitly, just like I trust her. But I understand that it’s not easy. I have tried to put myself in her position and imagine what I would have felt like if some guy turned up at our house and told me that he had slept with Rebecca a month ago. Would I have believed him or her? And what would have happened if I had found something else to make me concerned a few days later as Rebecca did with the lipstick on my collar? Maybe I would have believed her. Or maybe I would have needed some time too.

  This is a rubbish situation, but because I’m innocent, I’m able to cling to the belief that everything will be okay in the end. The truth will come out, and I have nothing to hide.

  Nothing at all.

  So why do I feel like I can’t relax?

  23

  REBECCA

  I slept poorly last night, which was to be expected, I suppose. But instead of moping around the house all day wasting away my Sunday, I decided to give Ally a text and see if she was free to go for a walk. I was glad to hear that she was and now I’m standing in the large park near my house waiting for her to turn up.

  It’s a bright and breezy morning, suggesting that the worst of winter is behind us in this country and that warmer days are ahead. I certainly hope so because I’m not a fan of the cold, and I hate when it goes dark while I’m still sitting at work. I have no idea how those people in Scandinavia cope where they live in almost permanent darkness for half of the year, but I’m grateful that while the English climate is bad, it’s not that bad. The speck of blue sky peeping through the fluffy white clouds overhead tells me that.