Excerpt

If my life had been a movie for television, my hand reaching for the envelope would have moved in slow motion, right before my world collapsed around me. But as it wasn’t, I had no idea that the matching paper inside was going to change quite a few issues in my otherwise quiet existence.

The glued flap of the envelope was also secured by Scotch tape – something I could never understand and always compared to those men who wear suspenders and a belt at the same time – and the letter was printed with a good laser printer; it was a very business-like letter, black ink, well typed, with no visible mistakes. It read, after my name and address:


Dear Mrs. Bennett:

It has taken me a year to send you this letter. I have written and re-written it many times, always looking for a better way to say what I need to say to you, but there are things that have to be blurted out or forever keep quiet.

Jeffrey and I were lovers. It all started four years ago when he and I met in a convention in Los Angeles. It just happened…

Neither of us planned on it, but it was one of those things one cannot avoid, and we saw each other as much as we could ever since until he died. His death left me devastated. I was even under medical care until a few months ago, so you can see that it wasn’t a passing fancy on my part and, I am sure, on his. We adored each other.

The reason I’m writing to you now is because I am moving back to Belgium, my country of origin, and need to give you a box that he left in my safekeeping. I have never opened it and have no idea what is inside – and I don’t have a key to it either.

I would like to meet with you soon and give it to you, and hope that you could forgive our deceit.

Sincerely yours,

Mireille Carrere


There was a telephone number under her name and in my numbness I couldn’t recall the borough where it belonged.

Jeffrey had a lover? I read the letter two more times before I looked around my desk, bills and other letters still on it, not hearing or seeing anything. For the last four years? Good heavens! The twins were twelve when it started; he had taken them to soccer practice and out trick-or-treating, to Baskin-Robbins and to Pizza Hut when I was fighting a deadline. How could that have happened?

I don’t recall for how long I sat there ignoring the cursor on my screen and the shrilling voices of the twins outside in the pool. I read the letter once more and the more I read the less sense it made to me. Or maybe I didn’t want it to make sense.

This woman, this Mireille, had not explained exactly who she was. Was she someone who worked with Jeffrey in his lab? Impossible! I would have known her. Was she a supplier for his company? If they had met in a convention she had to be in the same line of business he was, and that was Chemistry. My husband had been the owner of Bennett Chemicals, a company founded by his grandfather back in the 1930s that had passed into Jeffrey’s hands in 1991, the year the twins were born. During the last five years Bennett’s had been working on cloning, something that Jeffrey was very much into, and the company had became one of the first in the country to generate sheep whose milk contains the protein needed by people with the blood-clotting disorder called hemophilia. Jeffrey, at the age of forty-three when he died was one of the most important men in chemistry because of those findings. I could not imagine him living a secret life with someone from Belgium called Mireille. Another question that came to mind was, why would he leave a locked box to her for safekeeping and not with me, his wife?

The voice of my best friend and research assistant, Stephanie, sounded in the front hall and took me out of my trance. Getting up, I left the letter on my desk and went to meet her.

She was in my kitchen now, sitting across from me in my new-old narrow refectory table that belonged in some castle in Wales or in a Spanish monastery, never in the kitchen of a suburban widow. She had taken a Diet Coke from the fridge and was pouring its contents in a glass. Stephanie never drinks out of a can.

“You look horrible, completely washed-out. You should take a week off and sit out there under the sun and get some color on your face.” I hadn’t have time to tell her my news. “Or better yet, come with me to the gym, they have those tanning tables that will make you look like a Hawaiian in just two sessions…”

“Jeffrey was having an affair…”

She looked at me as I had uttered words in another language. “What did you say?”

I cleared my throat. “I said that Jeffrey had been having an affair when he died.”

“Having an…what are you talking about?”

I told her about the letter and its content in less than two minutes and in all that time her mouth didn’t close. Couldn’t close.

She leaned back in her chair and held the edge of the table with shaking hands. “Look… this has to be some sick joke from someone who has nothing better to do,” she could finally say.

“No, Steph, it’s true.”

“But how do you know? Just because this…person writes you a letter and tells you some cockeyed story about your late husband you are going to take her word as gospel?”

I looked at the ceiling as if expecting to see an answer engraved on it, an answer that would not be as harsh as the one I had in mind. But it didn’t come. Instead, everything started to take shape before my eyes.