Unfaithful: An unputdownable and absolutely gripping psychological thriller

by Natalie Barelli

  “He probably moved it to another device,” she says.

  I sit up abruptly. “Lakewood Park.”

  “What?”

  “Oh my god, June! I remember now, the other photos on his cell. There were a number of them with a dog, a retriever.”

  I close my eyes. I can see the park, and I can see the dog, I can see the sunset.

  I open them again. “I know how I can find him. I know where he walks his dog.”

  And just then Luis comes home. I introduce him to June, the kids come bouncing down the stairs to greet their dad. June says she has to go, and she puts on her coat while Carla ruffles through my bag for my purse because she needs money for new tights for her dance class tomorrow and before I have time to think, my hand has shot out towards her.

  “Wait!”

  I’ve shouted, and now they’re all looking at me: Carla, Matti, June, Luis, their gestures snap frozen in the moment.

  “Sorry!” I laugh. I take the bag from Carla and, as discreetly as I can, I feel for the necklace at the bottom of the bag, hide it in the palm of my hand, then hand the purse to Carla. “There you go, sweetie.”

  The necklace is still in my closed hand and Luis looks at it, and for a crazy moment I think he’s noticed. I hug June goodbye, nudging the strap of her purse from her shoulder and it falls to the floor.

  “Sorry! I don’t know what’s the matter with me!”

  It’s one of those bags with a million pockets and I’m on my knees, quickly shoving everything back into it and I manage to slip the necklace inside a small compartment on the side that closes with a press stud. I hand it back it to her.

  “There you go, sorry about that.”

  ‘That’s all right. Big day!” she says, with a wink.

  I hug her goodbye, clock Luis looking at me oddly, his head tilted. I smile as I will my heart to stop hammering.

  Thirty-Three

  I am sitting on a bench near the wooden platforms that I remember from the shots on Ryan’s phone, watching the sunset. This is around the time he took those photos. I remember those distinct blue and pink hues hinting at the sky.

  He might not come today, of course, and that’s okay, because if that’s the case, I will return tomorrow, and the day after, until I catch him. But dogs like routine, they like to go to the same places at the same times, so I think it won’t take long. If he still comes here, that is.

  Two dogs barrel down the path, pouncing after the tennis balls their owner has thrown for them. I watch a poodle dig a hole with two front paws, sending clods of wet earth all over the nearby swings. It starts to rain, big drops of water that stain the ground, and I think it won’t be today. I’m about to give up when I see a retriever with a red scarf around his neck. My heart jumps into my throat even before I recognize Ryan, ten feet behind him, looking so ordinary, unhurried, so normal that it makes my jaw lock with rage. I watch him for a moment as he stares down at his cellphone, his thumbs sliding up and down.

  He looks up at the sky and squints and before I have time to walk over to him, he has whistled for his dog and they’ve turned around in the direction of the gates, with me not far behind.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ryan crosses Riverside Drive and walks up the short driveway of an elegant home. He uses his own key to open the door before disappearing inside, the dog running ahead.

  This is good, I think. It’s better than confronting him in the park. He can’t run away from me if I’m in his house. I wonder if he lives alone. Surely not, such a big house. Is he married? Children? I’m pretty sure he said he wasn’t but everything he says is a lie. I hope he’s married. I want to tell his wife what kind of creep she’s saddled with.

  I walk up the steps to the porch, my pulse racing, my hands closed into tight fists, and ring the doorbell. The door opens almost immediately and I’m taken aback by the older woman in front of me. She smiles politely, pulling the edges of her powder-blue cardigan tighter around her.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for my friend,” I say, remembering not to choke on the word. “Ryan. Is he here?”

  I’m absolutely expecting her to say something like, There’s no Ryan here, please go sell your wares somewhere else. But no. She gives me a quick up and down appraisal and opens the door wider.

  “Yes, he is. Come in.”

  She ushers me into the living room, a large space divided in the center by double doors that almost take up the entire width. The house is lovely inside, with arched doorways and eye-catching woodwork around the doors. A window looks out onto a backyard where the dog sniffs around a wrought-iron garden table.

  This is absolutely not what I had in mind.

  “Would you like to sit down?” she asks.

  “That’s all right, thank you. I’ve been driving. I like to stretch my legs.”

  “Of course. Did you come from far?”

  “Not really,” I say, thereby contradicting myself. I don’t add anything else so after a moment or two, she smiles and says, “Well, I’ll fetch Ryan. I won’t be a minute.”

  I walk idly around the room, contemplate a framed poster of a Matisse exhibition at the Tate Gallery from 1953. In one corner of the room is a built-in cabinet, with shelves on top and cupboards below. I glance at the framed photos nestled among leafy plants. Ryan appears in a number of them, and they suggest that the woman who welcomed me is his mother.

  Grown man Ryan lives with his mother.

  Which goes some way to explaining things, I think. One photo, partly obscured by a split-leaf philodendron, catches my eye. I reach for it, and a rush of something like anger, or fear, erupts inside me. I have to pick it up, to look closer, to make sure I’m not mistaken. Blood is pulsing in my ears as I study the group photo, close to twenty people maybe, all gathered around Ryan’s mother, who is seated in the center. Most people are standing, some of the younger children are sitting crossed-legged on the floor. Ryan is standing next to his mother, his hand loosely resting on the back of her chair. I peer even closer but there’s no mistake. In the next row, to the left, plainly visible…

  “Here we are,” she says behind me. I’m still holding the photo when I turn around. Ryan is standing next to her, staring at me, an astonished look on his face. His gaze drops to the photo in my hand, and a patch of crimson grows up his neck and spreads across his cheeks.

  “What’s this?” I ask him, holding the photo, my mouth trembling.

  His mother frowns, looks from me to him. “It’s from my birthday,” she replies. “If you must know.” She tilts her head slightly, one hand tapping lightly on her sternum. “What was your name again?”

  “Anna. Ryan, can I have a word?” I can feel my nostrils flaring.

  “Is everything all right?” his mother asks.

  My eyes won’t leave his face and without answering her, he says, “Yeah, sure, it’s this way.”

  I put the photo back on the shelf and follow him down to the back of the house.

  Ryan has the run of the basement, a large room divided loosely into sections.

  “How did you find me?” he asks. I close the door of his room and he looks nervous suddenly. Good. I think back to the day I met him at the party. I can still see him pointing to Geoff on the opposite side of the room. Is he your boyfriend? Your husband, then?

  “You want to tell me what’s going on here, Ryan?”

  He sits down on a beanbag, doesn’t offer me a seat—not that I want one. I’m standing, my fists on my hips, so angry I’m vibrating.

  “How do you know Geoff?”

  He looks down at his hands. “He’s my uncle.”

  “Oh my god!” I have to sit down after all. I pull out the chair from the front of his desk. “Your uncle?” I have a headache. It’s knocking at the back of my skull. “So why did you pretend not to know him when I met you that day?”

  “Because he asked me to.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted me to take a photo of you.”


  “He wanted a photo of me? You’re going to have to do better than that, Ryan. What the hell is going on?”

  He looks at me, cheeks burning with embarrassment. “He wanted a naked selfie of you.”

  I could tell him, technically, if he takes the photo it’s not a selfie, but I don’t. I listen, my head in my hands, while Ryan explains our almost-tryst was a set-up. He was supposed to approach me as soon as Geoff left me alone, and lure me into that empty office and somehow get a photo of me naked.

  “I was amazed you went along with it,” he says, watching me from under hooded eyelids, but there’s a trace of manly pride dancing on his lips and I am nanoseconds away from smashing something into that face.

  I take a breath. “That makes two of us,” I say. But a wave of shame ripples through me as I remember how jealous I felt that day. How I suspected Geoff was turning his charms towards Mila, and how hurt I was that he had asked me to the party, and immediately left me alone, like he had more interesting people to talk to. And in the end, it was because of Geoff that I went along with Ryan’s attentions. I wanted him to watch.

  See? I’ve still got it. You might be losing interest, but just watch. He’s younger than you too, and much, much more attractive.

  “And that’s it? He wanted a photo of me naked?”

  He nods. “He says one time in Chicago on a trip you led him on and then rejected him. He wanted to get you back. I don’t know what he was going to do with it exactly, he never said.”

  Oh, but I know. He was biding his time. Sending it to me during the lecture was just a taste of things to come. He was going to tease me with it occasionally, keep me on tenterhooks with fear and shame, probably wait until I’d officially received the prize and only when the release of the photo could most humiliate me would it find its way into some public forum on the internet.

  All because I almost had sex with him one night, but saw sense at the last minute.

  “What about my car, did you do that too? Scratch it?”

  “He did that. He told me.”

  “Really? Wow.” I let out a laugh, a bitter one. “I hope you realize it’s illegal, what you did. It’s a criminal offense. You could go to jail. All I need to do is report you. You sent me the photo, I’m sure the cops can trace your phone from that.” Although I’m not sure about that last part.

  “I didn’t send it to you,” he says quickly. “He did.”

  “Geoff?”

  “Yes. He gave me his cell that night.”

  “His cell?”

  “Yeah, to take the photo with.”

  Which is why I didn’t see it when I returned the next day and I scrolled through Ryan’s phone. It was never there in the first place.

  I’m going to be sick. I sit there, fingernails digging into my palms. It’s amazing how you can go for years with an idea of someone. You might not know what they think of you exactly, but you have a firm idea of what kind of relationship you have, then one day you wake up and find out it’s completely different. Before Geoff cornered me in the storage cupboard the other day, I really, really thought he liked me—professionally, and yes, perhaps with a little, understood-not-to-be-acted-on flirting involved too. Realistic between colleagues who got on so well, I always thought.

  Turns out he really, really hates me.

  “Did he send you to the restaurant, too? That day you stood outside watching me?”

  “No! I just happened to walk past and I saw you, with your kids and your husband, and I felt bad. I thought about going in to tell you what was really going on.”

  I give a startled laugh. “You filed a sexual harassment complaint against me, Ryan. You can’t be feeling that bad.”

  He looks puzzled. “I didn’t file a complaint. Why would I do that?”

  “For the same reason you did everything else, because he asked you to.”

  “No, no. He didn’t ask me to do that and I wouldn’t have done it if he had. He knows I’m out.”

  I think about this for a moment. Suddenly, I wonder if Geoff made it up, and the more I think about it, the more I suspect that’s right. Surely complaints like that are handled by HR, not by another professor, even if he’s the chair. God. I’m such an idiot. I almost reach for my phone but realize it’s too late to call them now.

  I think back through the weeks of torment he’s put me through. The scratch on my car, the text he sent me in the middle of my lecture. WHORE. Geoff thinks I’m a whore not because I had sex with him, but because I didn’t.

  I lift my bag from the floor.

  “What are you going to do?” Ryan says, and I’m thrilled to detect a note of panic in his voice.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Halfway to the door I turn back to face him. “Do not say a word to Geoff, you understand? As far as he’s concerned, I know nothing. If I find out you’ve told him that I know, or that we even spoke, I swear to God I will turn you over to the police. Am I clear?” My mouth is so tight I can barely speak.

  Then a voice rings out from behind the door: “Everything all right in there?”

  I lean close and point a finger so close to his face I could almost stab him in the eye. “I can’t imagine you’d want your mother to know you’re involved in some sordid blackmail scam, either. So don’t test me, Ryan.”

  I sit in my car and I cry, because I’m so stupid and I’m humiliated and I think of my mother, because I always think of my mother when I get this overwhelming certitude that deep down, I’m a bad person and I deserved this. I think of that day when Geoff undid the top button of my shirt and I was flattered. I thought it was sexy. So what did I expect? I give myself a pass and look what happens: bad things, that’s what. Just like Geoff said. Bad things happen to women like you.

  Thirty-Four

  I get home, and Luis is instantly at me, itching for a fight.

  “Where were you? What happened with Matti this afternoon? I got all these calls from the soccer club, from you… what the hell? Where were you? Did you forget? Did you have your phone off?”

  He waves his phone at me then drops it on the table.

  “I’m sorry!” I repeat, for the umpteenth time. I reach for a bottle of red and check it against the light. I grab a tumbler from the shelf and set it on the table.

  “You’re drinking too much.”

  “Oh, be quiet.”

  “Honestly, Anna. You look exhausted.”

  “I am.” I rub my hands over my eyes. They feel tender and swollen. He pulls out a chair and sits down heavily.

  “Where are the kids?” I ask.

  “In their rooms.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “The police wanted to see me this afternoon.”

  I set the glass down with a bang. “What?”

  “They wanted to ask me about you.”

  “About me?”

  After a pause he says, “I need to tell you something.”

  He takes my hand, holds it, and I watch his face slowly become distorted with sadness. “Babe, I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

  I am on feet so fast I almost knock my chair over. “Don’t say it,” I urge. Don’t say it, Luis, if you do it will be real, please, Luis. Don’t say things we can’t come back from. It’s me, only me, remember? Remember how you would do anything to keep me forever? Remember? You love me so much, and I’m still here, baby. It’s you and me, against the world.

  But I’m too slow. He says it.

  “I’ve been having an affair.”

  And there it is. The confession, in all its pathetic, self-serving glory. I reach for another bottle of wine, having finished the first one. When I sit back down I’m shaking and I spill some on the table. Luis pretends not to notice. I think he’s grateful for the distraction as he tells me that it started, months ago, around April. I don’t tell him, yes, I know all about it, you can stop now. Spare me the sorry details. I already have them anyway. I’ve been chewing on them relentlessly for some time now. And what did she do to deserve such a pretty necklace? Was
it a gift in celebration of the happy news, perhaps? A baby! Everybody loves a baby!

  No. I don’t tell him any of that. I just listen to his story, from which all the sharp edges have been smoothed down and rounded. So it’s not so bad, really.

  He was working on the show with Isabelle, he says, planning the pieces; they worked late one night, had a drink, one thing led to another.

  “Well, that’s original,” I quip.

  “I don’t want to make excuses,” he says, before proceeding to make excuses. “She was so… she loved my work, Anna… She looked up to me. I know it’s stupid but it felt good! To be wanted like that.”

  I try not to smash my glass into his face as I say all the predictable things. I love your work, too. I look up to you. I want you like that. So what’s wrong with me, why am I not enough?

  I’m staring down into my wine when I ask the question that’s been burning my throat all this time. “Were you going to leave us?”

  He stops talking then and stares at me, his face aflame.

  “Oh my god! You were?” Suddenly I’m standing.

  “No! Okay, yes, fine. I was tempted, yes—I had a moment there where for a second I thought I could have another kind of life. One when I wasn’t at your beck and call all the time.”

  I blink, raise a hand, palm out. I’ve managed to keep it together so far, but even I have my limits.

  “My beck and call?” I say, still blinking.

  “Anna! Come on!”

  “This is my fault?”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m missing something here. Are you saying I drove you to have an affair? Because of what, exactly? I ask that you walk the dog occasionally? Is that it?”

  “Don’t—”

  “Is that it?” I shout. I’m trembling with fury. Behind me are two mugs drying in the rack. I spin around and grab one and throw it at him. Roxy barks at my feet, spinning around, tail wagging.