The Affair (9 page)

“With what evidence?” Sheila wondered.

Kathy lifted her head to stare into her sister’s dark eyes. “Intuition.”

“I wonder how many marriages intuition has ruined?” Sheila asked softly, then waved Kathy on before she could comment.

“I confronted him. He denied it. Naturally.”

“But you got over it. You must have; you’re still together.”

“We got over it, sure, but it was hard. We’d just moved into the new house, and there was a lot going on. It was easy enough to concentrate on other things and just . . . well, just let it slide. Stephanie Burroughs moved away, and Robert stopped talking about her.”

Sheila wrapped her arms around her chest and sank down on her haunches beside the headstone. “So what changed?”

“The day before yesterday I came across her name—Stephanie Burroughs’s name—in his iPhone.” Even as she was saying it, it sounded flat to her ears.

Sheila looked at her blankly, obviously expecting more. “And?”

“Her name was in his phone, with a little red flag alongside it.”

Sheila dug in her pocket and pulled out her own phone. She ran her index finger across the screen before handing it across to her sister. “Scroll through this; I’m sure you’ll find the names of the last four men I’ve dated. That doesn’t mean I’m still seeing them. I’m also Facebook friends with most of my exes. I think you’re jumping to conclusions.”

“But her name is on Robert’s new phone. He only got it a couple of months ago.”

Sheila shoved her phone back into her pocket. “I got this less than a month ago. All that happens is that the names are stored on the SIM card in the phone. When you pop the card into a new phone, all your contact details are there.”

“There was a red flag beside her name.”

Sheila stared at her sister, saying nothing.

“I know, I know. It sounds completely pathetic, doesn’t it?” Kathy straightened suddenly. “Look, I’m sorry for dragging you out here. Maybe I’m losing my mind.”

“Honey, maybe you’re just reading too much into a situation.”

Kathy dusted down her coat. She faced the grave, crossed herself automatically, then turned away and headed back down the narrow path. Sheila hesitated a moment, then followed her. They walked a few yards in silence together.

“I searched his study,” Kathy said suddenly. “He had a credit card account I knew nothing about. He’d bought flowers, some stuff from a shopping channel, and a meal at L’Espalier restaurant.”

“I’m dying to go there.”

“So am I,” Kathy said pointedly.

“Oh.”

“I also found a speeding ticket for a time when he was supposed to be in Connecticut.” Spoken aloud, in the cold light of day, she realized again just how weak her accusations were. “He spends a lot of time away from home. He works late,” she added. Now that just sounded petty, she thought.

“So what are you asking me?” Sheila said.

“Do you think he’s having an affair?”

“Do you really want my advice and opinion or do you want me to support you?” Sheila asked. “Because they are not the same thing. If you want me to support you, I’ll do that. But I don’t think you want my advice.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. How can you explain the evidence?”

“What evidence?”

“The credit card.”

Sheila reached into her pocket and lifted out an olive Hobo wallet. She snapped it open. There were four credit cards in little plastic windows. Tucked into folds behind them were at least another half dozen plastic cards, Starbucks, Anthropologie, Banana Republic, Peet’s Coffee. “At home, I get an offer of a credit card at least once a day. Gold cards, platinum cards, AmEx, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America, First National. Maybe he simply took up the offer of a good rate.”

Kathy rounded on her sister. “What about the speeding ticket? He got it in Jamaica Plain on Halloween. The same night he was supposed to be in Connecticut.”

“Did he drive or take the train to Connecticut?”

Kathy opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again, suddenly feeling sick. Had Robert taken the train that time? He sometimes did. Particularly if he was going to be away overnight—he hated driving on 95. He’d been taking the train more recently. He had even gotten an Amtrak frequent traveler pass. “But how would that explain the car?”

Sheila shrugged. “Ask him. Did he lend it to someone? Was it in the garage?” She turned and caught her sister by both arms. “You’ve got to be so careful, so sure of your facts. You’ve already made one accusation you couldn’t back up. Some men would have walked away at that point. Now you’re about to make another accusation. Be sure. Be very sure this time.”

“Whose side are you on?” Kathy asked shakily.

“Yours. Always yours.” They reached the gates of the cemetery. Sheila stopped and held her sister’s hands. “I’ve been there, but from the other side. I was once stopped in the street by a woman I’d never met. She accused me of having an affair with her husband. I knew the man, I’d worked with him on a couple of occasions, but I was most certainly not having an affair with him. Turned out he hadn’t been having an affair with anyone. The couple broke up almost immediately after that. He couldn’t live with the mistrust. Don’t make that mistake, Kathy. Don’t throw away eighteen years of marriage.” Sheila hesitated before giving her parting words of warning. “Don’t find an affair if there isn’t one to find.”

A
t least he hadn’t changed the locks.

Kathy Walker pushed open the door of R&K Productions and stepped into the office. A blast of warm air hit her, and she frowned. He’d left the heat on over the weekend. If Maureen had been there, she would never have allowed that to happen.

Then the alarm began to blip.

Had he changed the code? Kathy doubted it as she shoved the door closed and pulled open the little box on the wall behind it.
ENTER CODE
was flashing in bright green digital letters. She entered #328—their anniversary—and the blipping stopped. When they had first moved into the offices, she had chosen #328 because Robert had managed to forget every other combination of numbers. And, so that he’d remember their anniversary.

The office was more or less as she remembered it, though she hadn’t stood in it in nearly six months. Back when she had been more involved in the business, she had been there almost every day. There were a few new framed posters on the wall, stills from print jobs and brochures that R&K had worked on. The iMac on the receptionist’s desk looked new. Otherwise, it was the same: black leather and chrome furniture, looking a little tired now, and the same combination television and DVD in the corner. Just inside the door, a dispenser for Poland Spring water sat alongside the coffee pot. The ceramic mugs had been replaced by disposable cups. So much for being environmentally friendly. She was tempted for a moment to take a cup, but she didn’t want to leave any evidence that she’d been in the office.

She still wasn’t sure why she had come to R&K’s offices. Because of the traffic, the drive across the city had taken over an hour, and parking was impossible. Luckily, she’d eventually found a space around the corner from the office behind Hill House on Mt. Vernon Street. Maybe it was her sister’s parting words, “Don’t find an affair if there isn’t one to find,” that had sent her here. Is that what she was doing—looking for an affair, looking for an excuse?

An excuse to do what? Leave Robert? Throw him out?

What was she looking for? Two days ago, when she’d first suspected that he was having an affair, she’d known instantly what she would do: She would ask him to leave. No, not ask—demand. That had seemed so clear the day before yesterday. Today, she was less certain.

But she had to know. For her own peace of mind, if nothing else, she had to know. However, on the exhausting stop and start drive, she’d come to a decision: If she found nothing concrete in the office, then she’d forget about it. She would try to push it from her mind and would make a conscious effort to pay more attention to both Robert and the business. If her fears about an affair had forced her to do nothing else, they had made her evaluate her own behavior over the past few years. And she wasn’t thrilled with what she had discovered. Yes, it was all too easy to say that they had drifted apart. Easier still to blame him and the pressures of work. But what had she done? Or, more specifically, not done. As she had become more absorbed in the children and the new house, she’d certainly taken him and the work he was doing for granted. Reading his e-mails yesterday, discovering how hard he was struggling to keep the business afloat, she felt ashamed. When had she become so consumed with her own life that she had started to ignore his?

Kathy stepped around behind the receptionist’s desk. It was pristine—not a paperclip out of place. The new receptionist was certainly neater than Maureen, she thought. She pulled open the drawers looking for a diary or notepad; all receptionists usually had a scratch pad where they jotted down the names from the incoming calls. Even the drawers were neatly organized; even though she’d never met the new receptionist, she wasn’t sure she liked her.

Kathy finally found a pad under a well-thumbed version of the Oxford English Dictionary in the bottom drawer. It was a red and black spiral-bound notebook. Across the top of each page was a date and below it the times and names from all the phone calls into the office. Kathy carried the notepad to the window and tilted it to the light. She didn’t want to risk turning on any of the interior lights and drawing attention to the premises. Most of the names and numbers were unfamiliar; a few were recognizable to her from the days she’d worked the desk. She ran her finger down the calls for the previous day.

There was no Stephanie Burroughs listed.

Kathy fished out the sheet of paper from her purse with Stephanie’s details on it and checked the number against the incoming calls. Nothing.

Before she returned the notepad to the bottom drawer, Kathy looked back over the week’s calls, but as far as she could see, no phone calls had come in from Burroughs on the office line.

Maybe she was using the cell, a little malicious voice argued. Maybe she wasn’t calling at all, an even smaller inner voice countered.

Kathy pushed open the door and stepped into Robert’s office. It was exactly as she remembered it. The only change was the scattering of Christmas cards on the liquor cabinet and a real Christmas tree in the corner, scenting the air with pine. The small tree was decorated with winking white lights that had been left on and the Waterford Crystal ornaments her parents had given them for their first Christmas together. Kathy and Robert had decided that they were too good to use at home—the children might break them—and that they would make a much better impression in the office. She ran a fingernail down one of the handblown pieces, vaguely touched that he’d kept them for all these years and was still using them.

The room was a long rectangle. There was a circular conference table at one end of the room, while Robert’s desk occupied the other. A large window took up one wall, while an oak bookcase stood against another wall. It proudly displayed the various awards the company had won in the last two decades: Tellys, CLIOs, ADDYs, Summit International Awards, and Communicator Awards. The statuettes were crammed into the three bottom shelves, while a framed picture of Robert holding the Palme d’Or stood proudly alone on the top shelf. The conference table gleamed, papers piled neatly on the center of the table. She touched a page, spinning it toward her. It was a headshot of an incredibly handsome young man. She quickly looked over the other pages. They were all related to DaBoyz, a boy band she’d never heard of. It looked as if Robert was pitching to shoot their next music video. He knew nothing about music videos, but she guessed that the band didn’t know that.

She crossed the office and stood before Robert’s desk. It felt strange to be here, sneaking like a thief into her own company. Because she did own half the company; fifty percent of the shares were in her name. What would happen if they broke up, she wondered. Would the company have to be sold or broken up, or would he have to buy out her share? And what happened then to his share of the house? Would she have to buy him out in turn?

Kathy deliberately drifted away from that thought.

As Sheila had reminded her, she had to be sure of her facts before she went off making wild accusations.

She moved around Robert’s desk and sat in the heavy leather chair. It sighed beneath her weight. She’d bought him this chair shortly after they had moved into this office. Like his office at home, the desk was clean and bare except for a fountain-pen set that was placed at an angle off to one side, alongside a modern desk lamp. Mirroring it, on the left-hand side of the desk was a silver photo frame in three panels. Kathy reached for it, then stopped, unwilling to touch and possibly move it. She forgot her fear about drawing attention to the building and turned on the lamp, flooding the desk in warm, yellow light. The frame held three photos: Brendan in the left frame, Theresa in the right, and Robert and Kathy in the middle frame. It was an old photograph taken in New York just before they were married, with the Empire State Building in the background. She’d almost forgotten about the photo. That had been a fabulous vacation, just the two of them, madly in love, engaged to be married, with the world full of possibilities and hope.

If Robert was having an affair, he was hardly likely to keep photos of his wife and children on his desk, was he?

She tried the drawers. They were locked. So this trip had been for nothing. No, not for nothing. At least it had gone a long way toward confirming that Robert was not seeing Stephanie. She wasn’t phoning him every day, and there was a family photo on the desk, which at least suggested that his mistress was not visiting him in the office.

Placing her elbows on the desktop and cradling her head in her hands, she squeezed her eyes shut. She felt sick and yet curiously elated. She’d overreacted. She was tired, exhausted, stressed out by the season. Next year they would go away for Christmas. Boycott the holiday.

Well, at least she’d had a wake-up call. The last couple of days had highlighted some problems in her marriage, but problems that could be solved. After Christmas, the pair of them would finally get away for that weekend at the Cape or the Vineyard, and talk. It had been a long time since they had talked, really talked about stuff that mattered. With the constant pressures of modern life, it was so easy to lose touch with what was really important.

Thank God, she hadn’t said anything....

She was leaving the office when she saw the filing cabinet behind the door. She hadn’t noticed it when she first came in. It was a small, two-door, dark oak cabinet that matched the bookshelf. On impulse, she pulled at the top drawer, expecting to find it locked. It clicked and slid open easily. The files were all neatly tabbed and color-coded, and she saw the hand of the new secretary in it.

The top drawer seemed to be mainly brochures, letters to and from other production companies, pitches for projects.

Kathy knelt down and rummaged through the second drawer. It was full of invoices and bills. She hesitated, then lifted out the file marked AT&T. All of Robert’s cell phone bills were neatly arranged in chronological order. She pulled out the most recent bill.

And her heart almost stopped.

Robert Walker phoned Stephanie Burroughs seven or eight times a day. The first call of the day and the last call at night from his cell phone were either to her home phone or her cell.

Kathy’s heart started to pound hard enough to vibrate through her flesh. She swallowed bile.

Calls ranged in duration from a couple of minutes to an hour. And texts. Innumerable texts. Mostly to the same number. Kathy flipped to a random page and ran her finger down the list of fifty numbers. Two of the text messages had been to her own cell; the other forty-eight were all to the same number: Stephanie Burroughs’s number.

Every day.

Seven days a week.

Hundreds of calls. Hundreds of texts.

Kathy barely made it to the toilet before she threw up.