The Woman At The Door by Daniel Hurst (manga ebook reader .TXT) 📗

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