Chapter 5

I went home and was planning what I could have for dinner when the doorbell rang. I wondered about that and went to answer it. I put the chain on and opened it a crack to see who it was. Rob’s angry visit from the night before, had me wary. The cameras up in the trees had enough memory to record for another day before I’d need to empty them, but that wouldn’t help me if he was there to shoot me. It wasn’t Rob though. It was Ted.

I opened the door and looked at him wordlessly. He’d told me Friday night that he’d stand by his daughter and that’s right, but it still underlined how important I was to him.

“Hello, Adam,” he said softly. Maybe he sensed the distance between us now. He’d always called me Son since Jennifer and I became engaged.

“Hello, Ted,” I said calmly. “What brings you by tonight?”

“I wanted to talk to you, man to man,” he said. “May I come in?”

I nodded and stood aside. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like this talk. I led him into the living room and we sat down to talk.

“Thanks for talking to me,” he said uncomfortably. “I understand that this week has been hard on you. I’m sorry that I haven’t been by to see you before now.”

“That’s okay,” I told him. “You left me with the understanding that Jennifer was your concern and everything else came second. I’m glad she had your support this week.”

“How have you been?” he asked tentatively.

“Suicidal, too sick to eat most of the week, unable to sleep without seeing things no man should ever watch his wife doing, devastated that it was my friends and co-workers that she was doing it with. Humiliated at how funny they found the whole situation, worried about retribution from them in the wake of all of this,” I told him simply, without any bite in my voice. “How have you and Sylvie been holding up in the light of the news?”

He nodded at the things I told him and he sighed. “We’re deeply disappointed in our daughter,” he told me. “We’re also disappointed in you. I thought you loved Jennie more than to move for a divorce.”

There it was. He wanted me to drop the divorce. “Does Jennifer know you’re here?” I asked lightly.

“No. She’s at home with her mother. We’ve kept a close watch on her since Friday. She hasn’t been out of the house much except the other night when she came here to talk to you.”

I nodded. “So you came here to plead for me to take her back?”

“I’m hoping you’ll come to your senses,” he said. “She loves you.”

“If I didn’t love her, do you think I’d be in this much pain this week, Ted?” I asked him pointedly.

“No, I suppose not,” he admitted. “I’m not asking you to stop hurting or stop being angry, but dammit, don’t throw away your marriage. Take her back and work through it. That’s what a man does.”

“Thank you, Ted,” I said dully. “I needed another reminder that I’m not man enough for your daughter.”

“That’s not what I meant, Adam,” he chided me. “I’m asking you to think about your family.”

“Has Sylvie ever cheated on you, Ted?”

“No,” he admitted. “If she had, I’d have stayed with her though. It might have taken us years to put it behind us, but we would have tried.”

“Have you ever cheated on her?” I followed up.

“Once,” he admitted reluctantly. “It DID take us years to resolve it.”

“When she took you back, did she tell you what she’d do if you ever cheated again?”

He nodded. “It wasn’t pleasant,” he told me, not wanting to share.

“Jennifer cheated on me thousands of times with around 50 people over the past six years. I’m talking to her. We had a pleasant conversation last night without hurting each other unduly. Could you really endure that? Could you watch her having sex with everyone you considered a friend and not die inside?”

He put his head down. “I’m just asking you to try.”

“Your daughter asked me for something far more realistic last night,” I told him. “She wants us to stay friends after the divorce. She doesn’t want the divorce either, but she knows that our relationship was built on a lie. She was sleeping with my best friend before we went on our first date. If we ever have a chance to reconcile, we need to start over. We can’t dust off our marriage. It’s destroyed. All we can do is knock it over and hope that when the wreckage clears, we can do it right. Whether we become friends and each go on to separate futures or come back together, that’s really for us to decide and it’s not going to be a decision we can be pushed into.”

“You know,” he said, starting to get angry, “we’ve always treated you like a son.”

“Until Friday,” I finished for him. “As soon as you realized that we were at odds, it was time to think about family first and outsiders second. I’m not gonna get pissed off at you, but you made it clear that if one of us had to go down for this, you had Jennifer’s back. I was ‘Son’ while we were on the same page. As soon as there was a wall there, you made sure to let me know to include you in that wall too. You weren’t assholes about it, but you made it clear. You CALLED me Son, but she IS your daughter. Nothing wrong with that, but you could have chosen to let me know that you’d be there for both of us without choosing sides.”

“So that’s it?” he asked hotly. “You have one fight with her and you throw away your family? I really thought better of you.”

I sighed and got to my feet. “Come with me, Ted,” I said. I led him upstairs and sat him in front of my computer. I pointed to the video on my desktop. “That’s the video I took of Friday night. You need to watch that before you decide how to judge me.”

He looked at me irritably. “I have no desire to see that!” he snapped.

“NEITHER DID I!” I shouted at him. “If you want me to take her back, then at least have the fucking decency to see what you’re asking me to forgive. I’ll leave you in peace. It’s up to you whether you watch it or not. If you don’t, then you don’t have the right to ask me anything about my relationship.”

I left the room and a few minutes later, I heard the recording start. I could make out pieces of it, but I went out to the kitchen and started going through the fridge a little more loudly than I needed to. I didn’t feel like eating. Thanks for that, Ted. Instead, I started cleaning up around the house. I turned on the TV and found something mindless to drown out the sounds of my wife getting used by our whole circle of friends.

When it was over, he came downstairs and it was clear that he’d been crying. I poured him a drink and put it in his hand as I guided him back to the couch.

We didn’t speak. He just drank the scotch I’d poured him and stared at nothing. I understood. It had changed my world too. He finally came to his senses and looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry too,” I told him. “Neither of us should have seen that. Nothing I could have said would have made you understand what it was like.”

He sighed. “We don’t want to see you kids lose each other,” he said in despair.

“Could you have forgiven Sylvie if that had been her face? Her voice? Her body?”

“I ... I don’t know,” he admitted.

“I’m doing what I can, Ted,” I told him gently. “Right now, that means I talk to Jennifer and we go through the divorce. All the people there were my friends. They all betrayed me and I’m suing the shit out of them for their part in the divorce.”

“Jennifer mentioned that,” he said numbly. “There’s no way to fix this, is there?”

“Jennifer and I are both doing what we can to fix things, but that doesn’t mean we go back to what it was like before. What we had before was me working myself to death to keep me out of the way while she cheated on me like that every week for almost half of our marriage and to a lesser extent for the rest of the past six years.” I sighed. “Right now, we’re talking, being honest and clearing away the destruction so we can decide what we can build. Maybe a future, maybe friendship, maybe we put a headstone on it and walk away. I don’t have an answer. All I know is we’re both trying. She told me that she’d be willing to have me beat her every day for the rest of our lives if it helped me recover. She doesn’t expect us to get back together. She just asked me to consider punishing her instead of killing myself to get away from the pain.”

He nodded. The whole situation was patently awful. “What you said before, about us pushing you away for Jennifer...” he started and failed.

“It is what it is,” I said. “I’d hoped that you could be able to support both of us, but if you felt you had to choose sides, that’s the only choice you could make.”

We talked a little more and then he left when he was steady enough to drive. I checked the mail, made a can of soup, eating a little of it and refrigerating the rest for tomorrow.

Afterwards, I called Jennifer and talked to her a little about Christina and about her day. I didn’t make any mention of her father and I felt like that was the right thing to do. I asked if she’d seen her doctor since Friday and she told me that she had a session tomorrow right after lunch.

“Can I ask a favor, Adam?” she asked hopefully.

“You can ask,” I said agreeably.

“Can we ... Can you ... Shit! Okay, I’m just gonna say it. Mitch has been calling me. He wants to set up a party for Friday. I haven’t answered my phone, but he’s leaving messages. Can I come and spend the evening with you? I don’t mean for sex,” she assured me quickly. “I just ... When I’m with you, I’ll have the willpower to say no to him. If I’m alone, I don’t know. I ... I hate him Adam. I have for a long time. He just knows exactly what to say to get in my head and get me to say yes. He knows I’m sick and can’t turn him down. I need help to say no. I know I can do it if I’m with you. I SWEAR, I won’t touch you or even talk to you. I’ll bring a book and read in the corner. I just don’t want to be weak and I don’t know what else to do.”

“Okay, Jennifer,” I said. “You can come and spend the evening. I’ll probably invite Christina to come too.”

“Thank you!” she sobbed in relief. “He’s called three times today.”

“Save the messages,” I suggested. “Get the same app I use to record my calls. I bet that slows him down when you do that. Hell, call Grant and ask him if he can help you get a restraining order against him.” She wrote down the app name and promised to call Grant first thing in the morning.

I sighed and went to bed. I looked at the bed dubiously, but I’d already washed the sheets. I sighed. She was coming here tomorrow. I’d talk to Christina tomorrow and invite her. I got the sense that this was going to be my new normal for a little while.

The alarm woke me and I felt the deepest sense of gratitude to whatever force had let me sleep two nights in a row. I got showered, dressed and had some breakfast, packing another sandwich into my briefcase for the day. I was low on bread. I made a note to pick some up.

The whole day was exceptionally normal for me. We had six new people starting on Monday by the time the interviews were done. Today we catered Chinese for the staff, again in recognition of the hard work that we were asking of them. Henry and Collin were talking about an office party after we were able to get everything back to normal staffing levels and a little extra time off for those who had weathered the storm.

I called Jennifer during lunch and told her to come directly to the office when she was finished work and she could hang around while we finished up for the day.

“Are you sure?” she said uncertainly.

“Yes,” I told her. “There’s a couch in my office and that way you won’t be tempted to answer the phone if Mitch calls you.” She worked doing medical transcriptions so she was in a closed office at the hospital. He wouldn’t be able to drop by to bug her. “Just run to your car and get in without talking to him if he tries to talk to you. Scream if he touches you and come right here.”

“I don’t think he’ll come here,” she said hopefully. “Grant said that he’d send him the restraining order as soon as he got back from court.”

“Good,” I said. “I think we’ll be able to remove John Mitchell as a factor in our lives.”

“I hope so. I want to have a long talk with you about how he gets under my skin. If anyone should know what makes my resolve crumble, you deserve to.”

“We can talk about that tonight,” I promised.

When we hung up, I went and found Christina and told her about Jennifer coming for the evening. “I’d like it if you came too,” I told her. “I’m still a little unsure about being alone with her and she can help pack up the crafting stuff from that bedroom for part of the evening.”

She smiled. “You need me to protect you?” she asked knowingly.

“A little,” I admitted nervously. “I’m starting to feel a little more normal and I don’t want to have anything happen that might set me back into the spiral I was on.”

She nodded. “I was just teasing you a little. Of course I’ll be there. I need to know how to find the place anyway, right?”

I nodded and relaxed, giving her a grateful smile. “She’s going to stop by after she’s done to hang out here until we’re ready to go.”

She nodded and then we both went back to lunch. I’d eaten most of my sandwich and felt stuffed, while she was indulging in the Chinese food the partners were providing.

I was deep in a zone, working at a steady pace when the knock at the door startled me. I looked up and one of the girls was standing there. “There’s a woman looking for you,” she said lightly. I didn’t have a secretary or assistant. Roger had picked a male assistant.

I thanked her and got up to go to the door. There was Jennifer, looking uncertainly around the room. She’d been here before, but there had been a different attitude then. It had been more relaxed and laid back. People had been chatting and there was a general attitude that things were in no hurry.

Now there was an energy in the air. People looked up and smiled, but most of them just went back to what they were doing. It was a busy office on a busy day.

I welcomed her and led her back to my office where they’d had Roger’s nameplate removed by building maintenance yesterday and a new plate added this morning. She paused to look at it. She touched the letters and smiled.

“You got your promotion!” she said with delight. “I’m glad that turned out right for you at least.”

I smiled and led her inside. “Thanks,” I said. “Roger offered me his share of the company as part of his settlement offer. We sign the papers on Monday. Until then, I’m just squatting in his office.”

She nodded and looked around. “It’s nice,” she commented and went over to the couch, pulling a book from her purse and curling up.

I chuckled and got back to work for a while. I caught her stealing glances at me and finally sat back and took a break so we could talk. “You keep looking over here,” I let her know that I’d noticed. “Do I look better or worse?” I asked.

She put her book down and looked at me. “You’re still terribly thin,” she said, “but your color is starting to return and your eyes don’t look quite so haunted. You look better than you did, but you have some weight that you need to put back on.”

I nodded and told her that I’d started sleeping better since the lawsuits got served and that I was able to eat a little now.

She nodded and said she was glad. “Mitch called again while I was with my doctor,” she told me, bringing up the topic of her therapy and Mitch.”

“Did he leave a message?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’ll play the messages for you tonight,” she promised. “My doctor and I talked a lot about what happened and where to go from here. She’s hoping that I can start building a more honest relationship with you, whether it’s as friends or we can find a way to build a new future together. She asked me what you knew and what you’d seen. I think she’d like to meet you and see if she can explain some of what my problem is.”

I nodded. “I’m willing to meet her,” I said gently. “Did she give you any good advice today about what’s been happening and how to handle it?”

“To be honest with you about what I want, what I need and what you would need to do to protect me if we DO build a future together.”

I nodded. “I think that’s a good idea. I wish she’d known you when we first met.”

She nodded and we went back to our separate projects for a little while, until she looked up at me suddenly, her book forgotten again. “Have you decided whether you’re going to go after Christina or not?”

I paused, saving my work and looking at her amused. “Not really. I told her what you said about spending her Friday night here and she said you weren’t wrong. I asked her to move into the house at the start of the week.”

She closed her book and perked up at that news. “Really?!” she asked excited. “Is she going to?”

I nodded. “On Monday, we were in a situation where she was going to leave the firm, I was already fired and she was probably going to have to leave town if she didn’t find a new job soon. I offered her your craft room for a bedroom.”

She grimaced and I thought it was the disruption to her quilting. “ADAM!” she said, exasperated. “You have a king-sized bed, a half-empty dresser and a walk-in closet that you barely use. Move her in there and ask her to be your cuddle-buddy,” she told me like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I chuckled and shook my head. “I don’t think she’s ready for that jump yet,” I scoffed lightly. “Besides, doesn’t that represent a wrinkle to the plan to build a future between you and me?”

She shrugged. “I’m a nympho,” she pointed out with a laugh. “I’d crawl in with both of you without hesitation.”

I nodded. “Well that’s assuming that she’s interested in moving into my room and assumes that she’s open to sex with another woman and that she’s attracted to you.”

She shrugged. “Bisexual girls are pretty common,” she said lightly. “We can probably find out pretty easily though.”

“Let’s just work on friends first and then we’ll see if there’s some attraction there?” I suggested and she giggled.

“Okay,” she agreed.

It was good to have the conversation come easily for us. It hadn’t for a long time. She returned to her book and I dug into my work for another couple of hours. I’d been glancing at the clock and seen that it was 5:30 when Jennifer’s phone rang.

“It’s him,” she said, her face turning pale. “Tell me what to do!”

“It’s okay,” I told her calmly and went to close the door over. “Put it on speaker and immediately tell him you’re recording all your calls now. Then ask for consent to record the call.”

She nodded and put it on speaker. “Hello, John. Before you say anything, I’ve started recording all my calls. Do you want to end the call now or do you agree to be recorded?”

“Since when?” John’s voice blurted out.

“So I take it then that you’re okay being recorded?” she pushed.

“Whatever,” he said. “Be ready at 7 and be out front.”

“I’m not going,” she said. “After last week, did you really think I was going to your house ever again?”

“You’re gonna pretend to be the good wife?” he laughed. “We both know you’re a slut. You love the action. Even now, you can feel yourself getting wet. You can’t help it.”

“John, you’ve known I’ve been sick for a long time and you’ve managed to use that knowledge to use me as your sex slave for the last six years. It’s over. Stop calling me. Now that Adam knows, you can’t even use the threat of telling him to get me to listen to you any more. You’ve ruined my life and Adam’s and a lot of other people’s lives by dragging them into this. Rob’s probably going to shoot himself or do something stupid to get himself arrested within a month, God only knows how many people are getting divorces, ME included, Roger lost his company and all the people that worked for him that’ll be hanging around your basement tonight lost their jobs too. So, no. I’m not coming to your house ever again. If you need someone to fuck and suck your party guests, you do it! For the record, Mitch, of all the men I’ve had sex with, the best thing about sex with you was Mona. I hope Adam leaves you with nothing at the end of his lawsuit and I’m going to testify when it goes to court. Don’t ever call me again. If you ever considered Adam your friend, you’d settle the lawsuit for what he wants, then you’d write a long apology and light yourself on fire in that game room that you have in the basement. I hate you and I hope you die.”

She was seething and snarling into the phone and she hung up on him before he could get a word in edgewise.

I went to sit with her while she cried and shook in the wake of that call. I held her and she trembled, clinging to me as she wept.

Her phone rang and I picked it up. It was Mitch. She looked at the screen and hit the speakerphone button, letting me hold the phone.

He started as soon as the call connected. “Listen, you fucking whore, you belong to ME. If your husband has a problem with that, he can come here and try to take you from me. You’ll be here at seven or I’ll beat your slut-ass so bad you won’t be able to go out in public for a week. Got it?!!?”

Her head whipped around and she snarled. “Don’t you threaten ME, you piece of shit!” she growled back at him. “You don’t have the BALLS to put your hands on me again. You’re WIFE is a better man than you’ll ever be.”

“Alright, whore!” he rasped, obviously trying not to scream into the phone. “You have your orders. You be here at seven. No one’s coming to pick you up. You get your ass here and be fucking on time. You’ve already earned a beating to remember. If you’re late, you get one you might not live through.”