Unfaithful: An unputdownable and absolutely gripping psychological thriller

by Natalie Barelli

  I can’t. I just can’t. My brain is zapped. I vaguely remember some email about sending the notes and I just dismissed it. It’s not my fault these people can’t decipher an elegant proof unless it’s pureed and spoon-fed to them.

  I don’t have time for this. My mouse hovers over the reply button but what am I going to say? I’ll get back to you?

  I shift the cursor over to the delete button and click.

  Twenty-Five

  It is an honor to stand here and present, officially, my solution of the Pentti-Stone conjecture to the Forrester Foundation.

  This is the opening sentence of my lecture and I repeat it to myself like a mantra—a trick that June taught me earlier—to keep myself focused.

  “You only need to remember the first sentence,” she said, “and the rest will come.”

  It is an honor… I am standing on the stage in the large auditorium. We only use this space for conferences, panels or public talks, like the one I’m about to give. Its raked seating is split into two tiers with a balustrade running along the middle. The walls are covered in beige cloth that, coupled with the comfortable grey seats—padded, no hard plastic here—gives the space an acoustic hush. Everything here was recently refurbished—thanks to a financial grant I secured two years ago—and it still has that smell of newness.

  I’m a bit nervous, but in a good way. Frankly, it was a godsend to have June help me prepare earlier. It enabled me to put aside the Ryan situation, for one thing. I didn’t tell her, although I will, but not today. Right now, I am focusing on the lecture and doing the breathing exercises she demonstrated earlier. I have my laptop, and a bottle of mineral water—again, June’s orders, in case I start to cough. “Or even if you lose your train of thought, you can take a sip and get yourself back on track. No one will know.” She also suggested I have my phone nearby—on silent of course—in case I need to access my notes.

  “When did you become such an expert?” I asked her.

  “I did a course on public speaking once. Never used it. I’m glad it’s come in handy finally.”

  It certainly has. I feel calm, prepared, quietly confident. I’ve been mic-ed, we’ve tested everything, including the screen above me where my slides are projected. I look up at a sea of faces, hundreds of them, staring back at me. From my vantage point it looks like every single seat is filled, even the ones right up there at the back of the sloping seating. A deep, genuine sense of pride overcomes me, like a balloon slowly expanding in my chest and, in spite of everything, or maybe because of everything, I wish Luis was here.

  To my left, on the edge of the stage, a technician fiddles with a camera on a tripod. He gives me a thumbs-up that we are ready to go. High above me the screen displays the first slide, which is just the title of my lecture: The Pentti-Stone Conjecture, or Love among Prime Numbers.

  The Dean of the School of Science introduces me as needing no introduction, which provokes a ripple of laughter through the audience. Then a hush settles and I am ready to begin.

  I click on my laptop and display the first slide. What is it about prime numbers and their random affection for each other?

  I talk about twin primes, a pair of primes that are separated by two. I describe solitary numbers and how all prime numbers are solitary as far as we know. I tell them about perfect numbers and how together they form a club, to which weird numbers do not belong. I show them some amicable numbers, not to be confused with friendly numbers or, their relations, sociable numbers. I introduce cousin primes and good and happy primes and close this chapter with betrothed numbers, also known as quasi-amicable numbers.

  “Whoever said mathematics wasn’t sexy clearly never studied number theory.”

  They laugh. As an introduction, it was good. I can tell. People are quiet, they’re taking notes, the ones I can see when I shield the light with one hand are smiling. Then I spot Geoff and Mila in the front row whispering to each other and it throws me. I wish I hadn’t seen them. I take a sip of water and click the mouse. The next slide introduces the meat of my lecture and is titled, What is the Pentti-Stone Conjecture?

  When my phone buzzes on the lectern in front of me I glance at it without thinking. It’s a text with a thumbnail. I’m about to look away when I see the word. WHORE. I feel a sudden tightening of my chest as I swipe my thumb over it.

  The room is silent. They’re all waiting for me, but I can’t move. I can’t take my eyes off the picture which now fills the screen of my phone. I didn’t recognize it at first. I didn’t recognize me. But it is me, lying back on a dark grey carpet, my arm flung loosely over my eyes. I’m naked, although you can only see down to my waist, but my breasts are exposed, large, indecently filling up the screen. There’s a murmur through the audience and I look up finally, and for a moment I forget why I’m standing here. Then my phone buzzes again.

  Enjoy your next slide. I know I will!

  I slap down the laptop screen and turn around, looking up. It’s still the previous slide. What is the Pentti-Stone Conjecture? but I panic, lift my laptop and yank out the lead.

  The screen above me is blue, with an error message in the center.

  No signal.

  There’s a rustle of activity offstage and the technician comes forward.

  “What’s going on?” he whispers. But I can barely breathe as I scan the faces looking for Ryan, except everything looks distorted, like I’m looking through thick, swirly glass. I hear murmuring.

  “Let me help,” the technician whispers. He picks up the lead and starts to plug the laptop back in.

  “No!” I snatch it from him. “Just leave it,” I hiss. It’s like I’m in a nightmare; I’m in a scene from a horror movie. I’m almost surprised not to have pig’s blood drop on top of my head.

  In the front row the dean looks like he’s having an apoplexy. The technician looks around, confused.

  “I can fix it,” he says quietly.

  “I don’t want you to,” I reply, just as quietly. He looks up at the screen. By now I’m hyperventilating. “I’ll keep going, leave it. Please go. Please.”

  He retreats offstage. Someone backstage asks him something and he opens his hands in a nothing-I-can-do gesture. I turn back to the audience. My gaze lands on Mila: she’s waiting, like everyone else, a small smile on her lips.

  “When Alex first pointed out the connection between…” I stop abruptly. Did I just say Alex’s name? It’s the photo, it’s thrown me. I can’t concentrate. The word pulses in my brain. Whore. The dean looks puzzled. They all do.

  I close my eyes, picture my children. Pretend they’re here, in the audience.

  “You know what?” Miraculously, it works. “I don’t need slides. I don’t need prompts either. Because this solution doesn’t need a lecture. This solution, it’s a revelation. It’s a story. And I’m going to tell it to you.”

  I take a breath. I’ve got them again, my audience. I can tell. I feel like I’ve been walking a tightrope and I lost my balance but I didn’t fall. Now I am pumping with adrenaline and the other side is so close, I can almost touch it.

  “I also want to begin this, um, second part of my talk by dedicating it to Alex Brooks. Alex was a talented student at Locke Weidman and he was an inspiration to many, myself included.” I start to pace the length of the stage. “I’d like to say the solution came to me in an Archimedes-like moment, but unfortunately my flash of revelation was not so much a moment as an eternity. You could say it snuck up on me over a decade or two. My work on prime numbers began with my mother, herself a scientist of some note…”

  I get there in the end, one thought lurching into the next, and when the audience claps at the end they sound like they’re on my side.

  I get through the official prize-giving ceremony, the refreshments in the dean’s office, the questions, the compliments, everyone politely ignoring my moment of panic. On the way out, I manage to catch the technician, whose name, I learn, is Steve, and I apologize to him. “I don’t want your boss to t
hink it had anything to do with you,” I say. “I’ll call tomorrow and explain.”

  “Thank you, I’d appreciate that,” he says.

  Then I’m in my car, feeling ill, reliving the moment when I received the text. I feel betrayed, even though Ryan is a stranger to me. He promised he’d deleted it. He even pretended to do it in front of me.

  I pull out my cell, my stomach clenched in knots, and check the texts again. It’s from a private number.

  I put the cell away and open the laptop and load up PowerPoint to view my presentation. I scan through the slides, then I do it again.

  There’s no photo of me in them, naked or otherwise. I sit back against the seat and start to cry. I was so sure Ryan had found a way to insert that photo so that it would come up. Which makes no sense because it’s my laptop, and I went through my entire presentation a number of times this morning. But then again, he’s some kind of IT professional, isn’t he? Who knows what tools he has at his disposal. And what else could the text have meant? Enjoy your next slide. I know I will! Did he simply want to throw me? Probably, and it worked.

  I don’t even understand what Ryan wants from me, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he wants to hurt me. Why? Because I rejected him? Did he feel humiliated by me? I sit up. I wonder if he knows about the prize? Then a thought occurs to me: does he want a piece of it? Maybe he read about it on our website. Is that what this little exercise back there was all about? A taste of what he is capable of?

  All this, because he’s after my prize money?

  Twenty-Six

  June and I had arranged to go to an early movie after work. It was me who suggested we go this evening because, at the time, I thought it would be a nice way to unwind after the Forrester lecture. Right now, the word unwind makes me want to punch someone, but I rally. I text her and say I’ll meet her outside. And anyway, I don’t want to go home. I can’t bear the thought of Luis asking me how it went. The moment when I saw that text, thinking the photo was about to be projected on the screen for the viewing pleasure of the country’s foremost scientists, is still burnt into my brain, making me smolder with humiliation.

  On the way to the cinema June asks me about fifty times if I’m okay, and every time I say I’m fine.

  “Is it because of your mother, that you’re upset?”

  “What about my mother?”

  “That she didn’t come to your talk? I assume she didn’t come, am I right?”

  I snort. “I would have been surprised if she had.” Then I say I don’t want to talk about it right now and keep walking. She pats me on the shoulder and gives a nod of understanding, and I’m grateful we leave it at that.

  The movie is about a man who searches for his son but it’s much deeper than that. It’s about how relationships, no matter how solid, can turn on the smallest of events. Something you thought was strong and anchored and for ever can unravel in the blink of an eye. Which is when you realize that all along it was weak and unmoored and ephemeral and you were just a moron to believe otherwise.

  There is nothing about this movie that reminds me of Isabelle, and yet I’m not thinking about my shame anymore; I’m not thinking about Geoff, either. All I can think of is her, smiling back at me as she kissed my husband. That’s the moment my mind keeps lurching back to. It’s the image that is imprinted on my retina: Isabelle, her hands on either side of his face, her lips on his. The feeling of time being suspended. The silence of my world breaking. She’s all I can think about and now the movie makes no sense. June passes the bucket of popcorn over but I nudge it back towards her.

  “Actually, June, I don’t feel so good. I’m going to go home I think. Sorry.” I’m sitting on my leather jacket and I move around, trying to wriggle it free.

  “Oh, honey, sure! Let’s go, some fresh air will do you good.” She begins to gather her things but I put my hand on her arm.

  “No, you stay, enjoy the movie.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not really into it, anyway.”

  Behind us a man makes an impatient click of the tongue and we scurry away, half bent in the darkness.

  We end up at the Wonder Bar where we manage to score the window seat, a long padded bench nestled in a nook against the glass. I immediately order a Bourbon lemon tonic and lean back against the fake-fur pillows.

  It only takes two sips before I tell her what happened during my lecture. She listens, her mouth agape, her eyes growing wider until she brings her hands against her face and groans.

  “How horrible, Anna.”

  “Trust me, it could have been so much worse.”

  “But where did the photo come from? Who took it?”

  The words tumble out of me, making me realize how tightly coiled they were inside me, like I’ve let a spring loose.

  “I kind of screwed up.” I say this with my teeth bared, like an emoji trying to be funny. “This was when I had my suspicions Luis was having an affair. I’d also just found out Mila had gotten the promotion instead of me. I’m not trying to make excuses here… or maybe I am.” I wave a hand in the air. “Suffice to say, I felt like shit, and there he was, this nice man who made me laugh and who was interested in me. Somehow, we ended up in some empty office… Honestly, I didn’t even know what he had in mind but when he started to kiss me… I went along with it. Let the god of perfect wives come down and strike me with thorns or something, but I was thinking about what Luis had done, and frankly I was in the mood for revenge. I was imagining myself telling him later, one day, a long away. Guess what, Luis?” I laugh. “Hey, now the joke’s on me. And Luis will probably find out. One day, Ryan will strike.” I press my fingers against my eyes. “I think he’ll want money.”

  “Money? Like blackmail?”

  I nod. “I should have tried to stop him long ago. I kept wishing he would go away.”

  “You weren’t to know, Anna.”

  I look at her. “Oh, but I did. You remember the word on my car that day? I’m pretty sure he did that.”

  “But that was weeks ago! And, anyway, wasn’t it just kids?” She looks doubtful.

  “Will you help me find him, June? I don’t know what else he’s going to do but he’s scaring me. He’s stalked me in the past—”

  “Stalked?”

  “Yes. The day I found out about the prize, we went out for dinner to celebrate—”

  “At the Confit d’Oie?”

  “Yes! Wait. How do you know?”

  “You told me!”

  “Did I?”

  “In Geoff’s office. When we had those celebratory drinks.”

  I shudder when she says his name. Geoff. I’m yet to tell June what he did. I think I haven’t because I want to banish the event from my mind. Pretend it never happened. But I don’t think June would let me if she found out. She would tell someone, even if it meant she would lose her job.

  I shrug. “Anyway, he showed up outside the restaurant. They’ve got those big bay windows, floor to ceiling. It was awful. He stood there for ages, watching me. Everyone saw him. Creepy doesn’t even begin to describe it. I went to chase him up at work, of course, and that’s when I found out he doesn’t work there anymore.”

  “I’m so sorry, Anna. That’s awful.”

  “I know. Then this… photo… what if he sends it to other people?”

  She shakes her head for a moment, then she jerks her chin towards my bag. “Show me.”

  “No way. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore.” I knock back the rest of my drink. June motions to the waiter to get us another round.

  “Okay. Tell me about the dinner with Isabelle, then,” she says. “What happened?”

  I hop from one bad experience to the next. I describe the whole evening, including the fact that Isabelle arrived so early that I wasn’t even ready and I had to sit through dinner looking a hundred years old while she looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion shoot.

  June frowns. “How early?”

  “More than half an h
our.”

  She nods. “That’s why.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She came early so you wouldn’t be ready and she’d look fabulous. Compare the pair, sort of thing.”

  I think about this for a moment. “Seriously?”

  She taps the side of her nose. “Old trick, my friend.”

  “Wow, that’s nasty.”

  “That it is. What happened then?”

  I backtrack, tell her about finding the receipt for the necklace, and then seeing it on her at the market that day, and again at my house.

  “Maybe he gave it to her a long time ago,” June suggests. “When they were still… you know…”

  “Screwing behind my back? Except the date isn’t very old. Last month.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same necklace?”

  “I checked with the jewelry store.”

  “Ah. Five hundred dollars you said?”

  “And ten.”

  “Huh. A gift like that? It’s a commitment.”

  “Thanks, June, I really needed that!” I laugh quickly to take the sting out of my words. “Anyway, forget the necklace. It’s the least of my worries.” I tell her about the kiss, which is the crux of the matter. Anything else I could explain away, even her arriving too early, but not that.

  But saying it out loud is a mistake. As long as it was small and wrapped tightly inside my mind, it was only a memory, and possibly a dream. I still had a chance then, but not now. Now Luis and Isabelle are out in the open; I’ve let them out of the box. Their kiss exists not just in my mind, but in June’s, too. Isabelle belongs to Luis now. Extraordinary, beautiful, talented—or so he says—Isabelle. And then there’s me. Sad, old, crazy.

  It feels like hours later that we leave the bar. I feel regretful, like I talked too much. I’m vaguely annoyed with June for letting me.

  I zip up my jacket and wrap my black scarf around my neck. June wants to call me an Uber. She probably thinks I’m too drunk to do it myself which makes me annoyed again. I hug her tightly and tell her I will walk, it’s not far and the cold air will do me good. She gets into her ride and waves goodbye as I adjust my black beanie over my ears and slide my hands into my gloves.