The Affair

by Colette Freedman

  “Do I have a choice?” Kathy’s voice was shaky, but she was secretly relieved. She’d been dreading doing this on her own.

  “Of course you do. You could ask Julia to go with you.”

  Kathy laughed, a short barking sound that was completely without humor.

  “We’ll use my car. He won’t recognize it,” Sheila said. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “You really don’t have to do this,” Kathy said.

  “I want to,” Sheila answered.

  The two sisters were sitting in Sheila’s car on the street below the Boston Sports Club. Sheila had run into Starbucks, which was just across the plaza, and they were nursing cappuccinos as they observed the brick building. The entire second level of the building had floor-to-ceiling windows. Through the tall glass they could see people working out on the gleaming gym equipment.

  The sisters had cruised around the block twice before they finally spotted Robert’s Audi tucked away close to the hedge in a puddle of shadow. There was a silver BMW parked alongside it, but plenty of empty spaces in front of and behind the two cars. Kathy had leaned forward, squinting through the windshield at the BMW. Was that Stephanie’s car?

  “This is a good spot.” Sheila had tucked her Honda into a darkened corner of the street that afforded a good view of the front entrance to the building to the left and Robert’s car to the right. “This is very exciting. We’re like private eyes.” The moment she turned off the engine, the heater shut off, and chilly air began to invade the car. “I wonder how long they’ll be in there?” she said.

  “Maureen told me that they usually leave about eight.”

  Sheila leaned forward to look at the gym. “No matter how fanatical I was about my fitness, I’m not sure I’d be spending the night before Christmas Eve working out. Talk about neurotic.”

  “No, instead you’re sitting in a car with your hysterical sister spying on her philandering husband. That’s not neurotic at all.” Kathy smiled. “Trust me, I’m sure you could have found better ways to spend your twenty-third of December. Didn’t you have something planned with Alan?”

  Sheila didn’t answer immediately. She hit a switch and the windshield wipers swished across the windshield, wiping away stray flakes of snow. “Nothing that couldn’t be canceled.” She smiled, a flash of white teeth. “Doesn’t do any harm to keep them off balance; keeps them on their toes.”

  “Is that where I went wrong, do you think?” Kathy wondered aloud. “He stopped guessing about me; I became too predictable, too ordinary.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve raised two wonderful children and kept the house going; you gave Robert the freedom that allowed him to grow the business. That’s called a partnership.”

  Sitting in the darkness, staring out at the lights, Kathy gave voice to the questions that had been troubling her from the moment she had first seen Stephanie Burroughs’s name and known—absolutely known—that Robert was involved with her. “I keep asking myself what I could have done differently, how I could have kept him.”

  “Do you want to keep him?”

  Kathy sucked in a deep, ragged breath. “I don’t know. Everything’s just come at me so quickly. When I try to think logically about it, I get lost in issues like the house and the business and the children. . . .”

  “Forget all that for a minute. Focus on yourself. What do you want?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” Kathy whispered. “I’m not sure. When Maureen told me she thought they were in love . . . I hated him . . . and I immediately wanted him back. I wanted to take him away from her. The woman who had stolen him from me.” She shook her head. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re saying it was easier when you thought it was just sex?”

  “Of course. Having sex with someone is one thing. But loving her . . . giving yourself emotionally to her. That’s the deeper betrayal.”

  The windshield wipers worked again, squeaking slightly on the glass. Sheila took a long sip of her coffee before turning to her sister. “Alan is married,” she said softly.

  It took a long moment for the sentence to sink in.

  “Your boyfriend Alan is married?”

  “Married for twenty years with three children.” Sheila’s voice was a monotone.

  “Sheila! What were you thinking?” Kathy turned, pushing back against the door, twisting in the seat to look at her sister in horror.

  Sheila didn’t look at Kathy. Reflected Christmas lights ran red and white down her face. “I didn’t know he was married when I first met him, and he tried to hide it from me for a while, but it’s easy enough to find out. The married ones never have that endless free time the single ones do. Weekends were out of bounds; holidays were impossible. It’s easy to spot. But . . . he was fun. I enjoyed his company. And he made me laugh. I’ve dated a lot of immature guys, Kathy, and I wanted a man, not a boy. I wanted someone mature, someone who would look after me, respect me.”

  “But a married man!”

  “I know. But I never wanted him as a husband; I never wanted to take him away from his wife. I enjoy my freedom too much. I was absolutely fine just being the mistress. We have good times, great meals, fantastic sex. It was like being twenty again . . . except this time we had the money and the credit cards to enjoy it.”

  “Does his wife know?”

  “I’m not sure . . . maybe.”

  “Jesus, Sheila, if you knew what I’ve been through, you would never put another woman through it.”

  “It was all going fine,” Sheila continued as if she hadn’t heard her sister, “until he fell in love with me. Now he’s talking about leaving his wife and kids. He’s talking about getting a divorce. He wants to marry me.” Her voice was suddenly shaky. “Can you imagine it: me, married?”

  “You don’t love him?”

  “No,” Sheila said emphatically. “Like him, yes, love him, no. I was going to see him tonight, talk to him, try and break it off with him, before he does something idiotic like tell his wife. Recently, he has started talking about how much fun it would be to go on a honeymoon with me. I may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but that’s when the alarm bells starting ringing for me.”

  Kathy was shivering, and not with the cold. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her sister, Sheila, her baby sister, was a married man’s mistress. But her sister wasn’t a bad person, not an evil person. She hadn’t deliberately set out to trap a married man; in fact it looked as if she was doing everything in her power to ensure that he remained with his wife.

  “You’re going to tell me that I should never have taken up with him in the first place. But I’m a big girl; I went into this with my eyes open. And when I discovered that he was married, I didn’t walk away, did I?”

  “Why . . . why did you stay with him?”

  Sheila shrugged. “Who knows? We always want what we can’t have.”

  “You’ve no regrets about his wife?”

  “No. If she’d been looking after him, been interested in him, he would have never wandered in my direction.”

  Kathy looked away. Is that what had happened? Had Robert drifted away because she was no longer interested in him?

  “There they are,” Sheila said, pointing.

  This was the man you married.

  This was the man who proposed to you, the man with whom you exchanged wedding vows, the man who carried you over the threshold, who had made love to you, gotten you pregnant, stood in the hospital and held your hand while you gave birth.

  This was a man with whom you bought a home, started a business, raised a family.

  This was the man whose flesh you knew, whose clothes you washed, whose hand you held, whose lips you kissed.

  This was the man you loved and trusted.

  This was your husband.

  And he was holding the hand of another woman.

  Kathy Walker watched Robert stride out from the main entrance of the gym. There was a woman by his side, pretty, slim, b
right-eyed, smiling. Stephanie Burroughs.

  Neither was wearing gloves, and their hands were wrapped together, fingers interlinked. They moved easily alongside one another, confidently, their steps in rhythm. Glance at them quickly, and you’d see just another happy couple.

  They were both laughing.

  Kathy didn’t remember the last time she and Robert had laughed together, didn’t remember the last time they had held hands so easily, so intimately.

  The couple strolled over to the two cars. Both sets of lights flashed in unison as they hit their remotes simultaneously, and they laughed again, the sound high and brittle on the chill December air.

  Robert opened the door of Stephanie’s silver BMW. The interior light popped on. The woman threw her gym bag onto the passenger seat and turned to Robert. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed the palm of her right hand against the back of his skull to bring his head down to a level with hers. Then she kissed him. Robert responded by dropping his gym bag to the ground and pulling her close.

  The kiss went on for a long time. Kathy forced herself to continue watching, refusing to look away as this stranger passionately kissed her husband . . . and her husband returned the kiss with equal passion.

  Finally the couple broke apart, and Stephanie climbed into her car. She waved once and drove away. Robert picked up his bag and moved around the front of his car.

  Kathy pulled out her cell and hit a speed dial.

  “What are you doing?” Sheila hissed, snatching for the phone.

  It was too late. The call connected.

  “Hi, it’s me,” Kathy’s voice was level, remarkably controlled.

  Up the street, less than a hundred yards away, Robert stood with his phone pressed against his ear.

  “I’m just wondering what time you’ll be home?”

  Kathy and Sheila saw Robert lift his left arm to look at his watch. “I’m just leaving the office. I should be there in about forty minutes.”

  Kathy’s hands were trembling so hard that Sheila had to take the phone out of her hand and switch it off.

  “Now what?” Sheila asked when Robert’s car pulled out of its spot.

  “I’m going to see Stephanie Burroughs tomorrow,” Kathy said, her voice growing firm and cold with resolution. “I have to talk to her.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “I don’t know whether it’s a good idea or not. I don’t care. I have to talk to her.”

  “It will bring everything to a head,” Sheila said.

  “It’ll bring everything to a conclusion,” Kathy said firmly. But even as she was saying the words, she didn’t believe them.

  Book 2

  The Husband’s Story

  At first, I didn’t know what I was doing.

  That’s not an excuse. Simply a statement of fact. But I swear I didn’t set out to have an affair. It just happened.

  And then things got out of control. They got complicated.

  By the time I knew what I was doing, it was too late. I was in too deep.

  I was already in love with her.

  CHAPTER 18

  Thursday, 19th December

  Robert Walker sighed as the hot spray hit his body. There was an iron bar of tension stretched across his shoulders and what felt like a red-hot coal in the base of his spine from sitting in traffic.

  He hated Christmas.

  Hated everything that it stood for: its falseness, artificiality, pressure to spend, the cloying Christmas songs, and the traffic—he especially hated the traffic. One year, just one year, he would love to take off in early December and return around the middle of January and give the entire Christmas and New Year’s nonsense a miss. Play hooky from the holidays.

  Robert touched the dial, inching up the hot water. He dipped his head and turned, allowing the water to dance across his neck.

  Also, this year R&K Productions had shot a Christmas advertisement in June—when finding a Christmas tree had been next to impossible—and early in December had shot a segment for a docudrama that was set in the middle of August. Inasmuch as finding sunshine in Boston in the middle of winter was nearly impossible, and the budget wouldn’t stretch to moving cast and crew to a sunny locale, they had ended up using a few incredibly expensive HMIs to light the sets in such a way as to suggest brilliant weather. It meant that his entire year was topsy-turvy.

  But it was the traffic he really hated. Inner city Boston traffic multiplied to the power of ten because it was Christmas. Add lousy weather, and the seemingly never-ending construction, and the city was practically at a standstill. The politicians had claimed that traffic would get better after the Big Dig. But the Big Dig had become the Big Dug and, as far as he could see, there was no difference. The never-ending construction was suffocating.

  Robert tilted his face to the water. He ran his long fingers through his hair, pulling it back off his forehead. Then he grimaced and opened his eyes; a few strands had come away in his hands, entangled in his fingers. He was losing his hair. There had been a time when it wouldn’t have bothered him—he didn’t like to think of himself as vain—but things had changed.

  Not so long ago, it had been experience that counted in his business, and no one really cared what you looked like. But with the impossibility of getting real work—or what he called real work, artistic television documentaries—he had been forced to make more commercials. And he quickly discovered that in this end of the business, looks were everything. He was in the running to shoot a pop video for a boy band at the moment, trying to convince them that he was the right person to create something dark and cutting-edge to match their song. There was no way they were going to give the gig to someone who looked like their father. He would have to get some more Botox in his forehead, and perhaps Restylane injections in his mouth creases. He had to make himself look younger.

  He squeezed some shampoo into his hands and began to hum as he rubbed it gently into his scalp. Maybe it was also time to look at some of the treatments that were supposed to restore hair. He had started taking Propecia, but he wasn’t sure if it was working. He needed something faster, something that would have more immediate results. Robert saw ads in the papers all the time, special shampoos, electric caps, brushes that massaged the scalp . . . maybe there was a documentary in it. He grinned; he could try out all the treatments and charge it to the company as research. Although, with the way his luck was running, he’d probably go bald. Tilting his head back, he allowed the shower to rinse away the soap, then turned off the tap and stood for a moment, dripping, before pushing open the shower stall door and stepping out onto the bath rug.

  When the new power shower had been installed, he’d used the opportunity to redo the en suite bathroom. It was clean and white—he knew Kathy thought it was too cool and clinical—and one wall was completely covered in mirrored tiles. He felt that it gave the otherwise small room a great sense of space, but she had told him she hated the reflections, which allowed her to see all of her imperfections at the same time.

  He looked at his reflection in the glass. He was forty-nine years old and looked a couple of years younger. The age showed in the set of his jaw, the lines on his face and around his neck. But he was still in relatively good shape for a man pushing fifty, and although his waist had thickened a little, there was still no hint of a paunch. He worked out regularly and paid particular attention to his stomach and chest. He’d had a couple of sessions on a tanning bed—the new turbo kind, which you stood up in—and he was really pleased with the results. Now, if only he could save his hair.

  Robert stepped up to the mirror and patted his hair dry with a towel. He’d done a piece for a hair company a couple of years ago, and he remembered they advised that patting and gently rubbing were better than briskly scrubbing the hair with a towel. That damaged the delicate follicles. He tilted his head to one side. Earlier in the year, he’d noted the first real and dramatic signs of gray appearing. However, he’d gotten hair-coloring foam that blended
it away before anyone noticed.

  Well, Kathy hadn’t noticed.

  Stephanie had.

  She’d spotted it immediately. She preferred his silver wings; she thought they made him look distinguished. He thought they aged him and blended them away despite her objections.

  Wrapping a towel around his waist, Robert reached for the aftershave. He thought he heard a sound in the bedroom outside and popped his head around the door. “Kathy?”

  There was nothing there but a depression on the bedcovers that was gradually filling in. There were a few red Christmas envelopes on the bedcovers alongside the clothes he’d stripped off before climbing into the shower.

  “Kathy?” He stepped out of the bathroom and pulled open the bedroom door. He was in time to hear the kitchen door click. He picked up one of the Christmas cards, leaving damp fingerprints on the envelope, and glanced at it. Then he tossed the card back on the bed again; he knew what this was all about. Every year, Kathy would fight with him about Christmas-card addresses. She never seemed to have them, even though she’d sent out cards to the same addresses every year. He simply didn’t have the time to write dozens of cards. She did. What did she do all day anyway? His iPhone was sticking out of the pocket of his jacket, and he picked it up and turned it on, checking the screen for any missed calls. There were none.

  He splashed on some of the new cologne that Stephanie had bought him, wrinkling his nose at the musky smell. He hadn’t been sure about it at first, but it had slowly grown on him. He also liked the fact that it would mask the heavy musky perfume that she sometimes wore when they went out at night.

  He dressed quickly in jeans and a cashmere sweater and hurried down the stairs. The house was still and silent . . . and cold, very cold. There was a chill to the air. He trailed fingertips along the tops of the radiators, but they were scalding hot.

  When he pushed open the kitchen door, he discovered the cause of the chill: The back door was wide open, and Kathy was standing on the step.