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

might be my best lead. What did the woman tell Rebecca? She said that I slept with her a month ago. The clue must be in the timeframe.

What exactly was I doing a month ago?

‘Hang on a minute,’ I say, getting up off the sofa and going out into the hallway to where my work satchel is sitting near the bottom of the stairs. As I pick it up, I realise that the two dirty plates are still on the bottom step of the staircase and I really should put them in the kitchen, but this is more important, so I leave them and return to Rebecca in the living room.

Sitting down beside her again, I go into my satchel and take out my work diary from the inner compartment. I’m hoping that this will provide the answers as to what I was doing a month ago, and I thumb through the pages of it quickly to go back to the relevant dates.

It’s the 7th of February today, so I’m going back to early January, that frigid time of year when everybody in England is fed up with the cold weather and full from overindulging at Christmas, yet still facing a few more months of bleak winter and valiantly having a crack at their New Year’s resolutions. By this present date, most people will have given up on those resolutions, but back then, when the year was still young, there would have been hope, and it’s hope that keeps me turning these pages in search of an answer as to who the woman at the door really was.

I decide to start from January 4th because that was the first working day back in the office after the festive period, and I see the various meetings that I had scribbled into this diary that took place back then. There was a project design meeting that afternoon, as well as a conference call on the 5th but nothing unusual or anything that could help me figure out what this woman could have been referring to. A check on the 6th, 7th and 8th yields no returns either, and then it was the weekend, which I recall spending with Rebecca re-decorating the spare bedroom. We always like to get the house jobs done in winter so that we are free to enjoy the summer, and January had been no different. The spare bedroom was now looking good, and it was all thanks to the work that my wife and I did in early January.

That was a month ago.

So what the hell is this woman talking about?

‘I didn’t go anywhere but the office a month ago,’ I tell Rebecca as I shake my head and continue to turn the pages of my diary.

‘Could it be someone from work?’ she asks me. ‘That could be how they know who I am and where you live.’

‘But why would somebody from my office say these things? It doesn’t make any sense.’

Rebecca continues watching me search my diary, but I give up after I’ve been through the whole month and not found a single thing that says I stayed away for a night or deviated from my usual schedule. I know my wife must be having a hard time trusting me, but she has to understand that I’m also having a hard time trying to figure this out. I want answers, and I want them because that will be the only way that I can be sure that Rebecca trusts me again. While there is a lingering doubt, she will always have the thought in her head about the man I might really be.

Closing my diary, I put it back into my satchel and run my fingers along my chin as I think. I’m aware that I’m doing it, and I could stop, but I find myself rubbing my chin more and more these days when I have something tricky to ponder. My father did the same thing and I used to tease him about it, never thinking that I would one day end up exhibiting the exact same mannerism, but here I am, behaving just like him. I seem to be turning into my old man more and more as I get older, although there is one area where I will never follow in his footsteps.

I will never stray and break the heart of the woman I married.

I was fourteen when I came home from school to find my mother in tears and her best friend by her side offering support. I didn’t know what had happened until Mum told me later that night when she came into my room and sat down on my bed. She said that my father had found somebody else and that he wouldn’t be living with us anymore. It was a shock, and I ended up crying just as much as my mum, but that didn’t change the fact that my parents’ once happy marriage had come to an end. I ignored Dad for a while after that but eventually gave him a chance to make things up to me when he bought me tickets to see my favourite football team in the cup final. I felt like I was betraying Mum by seeing him again, but she was okay with it, and she made it clear that he was the one who had done the wrong thing, not me. Dad and I were never as close after that as we were before, but he was still very much a part of my life, and I was glad he came to my wedding to Rebecca. I was glad that he didn’t bring his new wife because Mum was there, and that would have been upsetting. But that experience showed me the damage that can be caused when one person breaks their word to another and ruins a relationship, which is why adultery is one sin you will never catch me committing. Yet that is the sin I have been accused of