The Woman At The Door, Daniel Hurst [world best books to read TXT] 📗

41

REBECCA

It’s been a busy day, and not just because it was my first official day back at work after my time off with sick leave. I took the leave because I needed some time to deal with the shock of my marriage collapse, and I’m glad I did, but I couldn’t put off going back forever. Alongside being on site, sitting in meetings with grumpy foremen and dodging excavators as they moved over the mud, I have also been busy making plans for my friend’s hen party, which is scheduled to take place four months from now. Her name is Rachel, and she is an old friend from my school days and Ally and I are her joint maids of honour. That means not only do we get to be with her as she prepares to walk down the aisle on her big day, but we also get to arrange the event that will signal an end of her ‘single’ days and send her headlong into matrimony.

You might think that helping plan a hen party for an upcoming marriage might be difficult when my own marriage is falling apart around me, and you would be right. But it’s not Rachel’s fault that my husband turned out to be a liar and a cheat, and that’s why she deserves to have me give it my best shot when it comes to helping plan her hen party. I haven’t even told her that I am having trouble with Sam, and I will leave it a while before I do because she has enough going on in her life right now with all the wedding planning without me drawing on her time with sob stories about women at the door and letters through the post. But I am planning on getting plenty of things off my chest tonight, and Ally is the perfect person to help me do that.

I walk through the wine bar and see my best friend sitting at one of the tables texting on her phone, so I walk over behind her and call out her name, making her jump because she hadn’t noticed me coming.

‘You’re such an idiot,’ she tells me as she puts her phone down and gives me a hug, and I laugh before I take my seat and scoop up the wine menu.

‘Are you ready for a fun night of hen party planning?’ Ally asks me as she puts her phone into her handbag and zips it up, letting me know that I have her full attention for the next few hours, not that I would expect anything less.

‘I am, actually. This is just what I need to take my mind off things.’

‘Things still bad with Sam?’

‘I’d say we’ve left bad behind and progressed onto doomed.’

I let out a sarcastic chuckle to try and keep things light, but Ally doesn’t buy it, and she takes my hand to get me to stop looking at the menu and look at her instead.

‘Oh, Becca, what’s happened now?’

‘Remember that woman who came to the door? The one who said she slept with Sam. Well, she wrote me a letter too in which she said that she felt guilty about what she had done but that it was still all true.’

Ally winces, and I bite my lip because I can feel the emotion threatening to overwhelm me again. Fortunately, a handsome waiter arrives at our table at that perfect moment and gives me the distraction that I need to keep the tears at bay and instead focus on the very important task of deciding what bottle we are going to select from the menu.

My friend and I make a quick decision on what we want to drink for the next hour or so, and the waiter scurries away to fetch it for us so that we can go back to lamenting my poor choice of husband.

‘What has Sam said about all of this?’ Ally wants to know. ‘Is he still denying it?’

‘Yep. He’s still maintaining his innocence. But I just can’t trust him anymore. It makes no sense for a woman to visit me and write to me if she wasn’t telling the truth. It would be the weirdest thing ever, right?’

Ally ponders it for a second before reluctantly agreeing.

‘So what are you going to do?’ she asks me as I watch the waiter standing by the bar in the distance with an empty tray that will soon be holding our drinks.

‘We’re finished. I know that much,’ I reply, shaking my head. ‘I just need to pull myself together enough to start making it official.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

The mood at the table has dropped drastically over the last few seconds, and I am aware that is my doing, so I should probably try and change that. But it’s easier said than done when all I can think about is my husband and his philandering ways.

‘I went to Sam’s office last week to show him the letter I got in the post,’ I say, watching the waiter carefully put the wine glasses onto his tray before he makes the journey back over to us. ‘But guess what I saw? I saw him leaving with some woman from his office, and they went into a bar together. He was laughing away as if he didn’t have a care in the world.’

‘What? Who was she?’

‘She’s called Maria,’ I reply. ‘I didn’t know that at the time, but I was having a look around on Sam’s company website yesterday, and I found her photo. Maria Garcia. Very exotic, hey?’

I know it was slightly stalkerish of me to go looking for Maria online so I could put a name to her face, but the sight of the two of them walking together and laughing together had been eating away at me. It makes it easier to dislike someone if you know their name.

‘Do you think he’s seeing this Maria?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘You didn’t hang around and see where they went after?’

‘No, I