Chapter 1

She looked pathetic.

“Please, I’m ... I’m begging you. Please don’t ... leave.” Her voice was hoarse from hours of crying. Her eyes were puffy, her make-up had clumped along her lower eyelashes, and she was looking up at me imploringly as she sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands wrung each other, and her knees were pressed firmly together.

Shame they hadn’t always stayed that way.

“It was a mistake. It was a horrible, horrible mistake.”

I snorted contemptuously, not even bothering to cast the thinly veiled look of disgust in her direction as I packed the last of my clothes into a case. “No, Sarah, a mistake happens once, not continuously and repeatedly for months. A mistake is something you own up to, not something you hide and lie about and make every attempt to keep making. That is not a mistake; that is called an affair.” My blistering, withering glare finally fell on her. “I am not the forgive and forget kind of man. We’re done. Divorce papers will be in the post.”

“You are a coward. Working at this is too much like hard work, so you are running away.” she sobbed.

“Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night.”

“If you loved me, you w...”

I spun on my heels, the furious flush in my cheeks blazing as the look alone was enough to silence her. “Finish that sentence. I fucking DARE you!” I snarled at her, the venom in my voice surprising both of us. “You have been screwing around in MY house. Not our house, mine! And you have been doing it for almost our entire marriage! You work in a fucking diner, I pay for everything. We have no kids and have been married for less than a year; no court in the land would give you half of anything. I could throw you out on your lying, cheating, slutty little ass right now. I could phone your mom too and tell her to come and pick up her tramp of a daughter, that if those grandkids she wanted so badly do come along, they sure as shit aren’t mine. I could make sure that everyone knows the type of person you are. Instead, I am leaving. I want nothing more to do with you or any of this bullshit situation ... You can keep all of it... unless you finish that fucking sentence.”

“Why can’t you forgive me? I said ``I’m sorry, I
am sorry.” She whimpered, her eyes fixed firmly on her feet.

“No, you’re not,” I replied levelly, not allowing her to hear the breaking of my heart in my voice as I finished my packing. She had crushed me in ways I simply couldn’t begin to put into words, but I’d be damned if I gave her the satisfaction of seeing that. “You weren’t sorry yesterday, you weren’t sorry last week, you weren’t sorry last month. You are sorry that you were caught, that’s all.” For the very last time, I looked into her eyes, the eyes that had made me fall for her so completely. “Good luck, Sarah, I mean that. Because you are going to need it.”

“Please, Dan, don’t go. We can survive this. We can get through this. But if you leave now, there is no chance, we can’t, we ... we won’t be able to get past this ... please. We are Dan and Sarah,” she sobbed loudly. “We are Dan and Sarah.”

“There is no Dan and Sarah anymore.”

And with that, I took off my wedding ring, dropped it onto the floor, picked up my case, and walked out of the house I had made into a home, forever.

I suppose I could go into detail for you. I could tell you how the credit card I had taken out for her had become maxed out, only for the company to come to me for payment. I’d gone through the bill of the card she said she never used, expecting to find fraud. Instead, I wound up finding hotel stays on nights she had said were nights out with her girlfriends. The purchases of lingerie that I had never seen, the meals at expensive restaurants on the side of town she said she’d never been to, Oh, and my favorite, the check-up and treatment at the local STD clinic for an infection I didn’t give her. It took me all of ten minutes to get an electronic copy of her phone bill – I paid for that too – to find the hours-long calls while I was working, the risque pictures, the arrangement of meetings ... Sarah was beautiful, she was funny, she was alluring, she was, I thought, the love of my life. But nobody could ever accuse her of being particularly bright.

We had been married for 10 months, and for at least 8 of those, she was screwing around behind my back ... I had been paying for all of it, and she expected me never to find out, and I only say at least 8 months because that is as far back as I could bring myself to keep looking. For all I know, she could have been doing it for years. Yet she still acted as if I had somehow violated her privacy when I confronted her about it, then she lied, then she tried saying it was all in my head ... And then, only after all of the proof was literally laid out for her did she finally admit to the affair.

With Lewis.

The guy who I had, until extremely recently, considered my best friend.

I suppose I could tell you all about it. But I just don’t have the energy.

The house door swung open as I finished loading up the car. Sarah, her disheveled-looking blonde hair bouncing around her shoulders as she ran down the path, held the thin robe around her body as she ran to the car. “Please, don’t leave, I love...” The last part of her sentence was cut off as I started the engine, turned up the volume on the radio, and pulled away. I didn’t even justify her begging with a cursory look into the rearview. I just drove.

I was a block away before the tears came. But, like my father always told me: Never let them see you bleed.

An hour later, I was sitting in the bar, and Bill, the barman who had lubricated many a night out with Lewis and our group of friends, was looking sympathetically over me as he delivered my drink. I had emptied the money from our shared bank account before the drink had even been poured, not that she had ever put a penny into it. The cards had all been canceled, and the credit card company had been told where to go for payment for the outstanding bill. I had given her a house worth well over a quarter of a mil. I’d be fucked if I was going to leave her anything else. She worked, she could use her own money to pay for the lifestyle I had provided her, and if she couldn’t afford it, then that was just too fucking bad.

Life lesson, Sarah: Don’t shit where you eat.

They say hell hath no fury as a woman scorned. Well, my very male fury was not something to sniff at either. As far as I was concerned, my obligation to care ended when she opened her legs, and my obligation to pay her way ended shortly after. More than that, she was still lucky not to be sitting at a bus stop somewhere with a case of her things at her feet.

Fuck her, Fuck both of them.

“Dan, I ... I don’t know what to say.” Bill said softly, leaning against the back bar and looking at me with eyes that almost seemed to leak sympathy. “I never thought that...” Those eyes flicked up at the sound of the opening door before his whole body tensed, and he stood himself up properly. “Lewis, mate, now is not a good time. You need to leave ... Now.”

Of fucking course.

“Why the hell would you do that to her?” The all-too-familiar voice echoed from behind me. “She said she was sorry, now be a man and move on! If you have a problem, don’t take it out on her, take it out on...”

I hit him.

In one fluid motion, I stood, turned, and buried my fist into his face with a power that few people realized that I had. Lewis, like everyone else, forgot that I had a very physical job, I essentially worked out for eight hours a day, five days a week, and despite not dressing to show it off, my body was a sculpted mass of hard-earned muscle. I had never been in a real fight, not even in school, but the punch I landed on that piece of shit would have made a prize-fight boxer swoon. I felt the bones in his jaw and his cheek buckle and break under the impact, I watched his eyes roll as his head spun on his neck, and I heard the sickening crack as his unconscious body fell backward, his head smashing into the side of the bar on its way down.

It took him a few moments to come around, but the first thing he saw when his eyes reopened was me towering over him, my fists still clenched with white-knuckled fury at my sides. “Oh, don’t worry about that, you piece of shit,” I growled. “I hadn’t forgotten about you at all!” I stooped down and grabbed hold of the knot in his tie, pulling him a little and drawing my fist back for another punch. Like the coward he was, he cowered, wincing and turning away, bringing his hands up to protect what was left of his bleeding face. The snarl on my lips curled into a vicious, taunting smile. “That’s what I thought.” I snorted, shoving him back onto the floor as Bill rounded the bar to end the fight.

“Dan, that’s enough, mate. I can’t let you do that here. I know you’re hurting, but...”

“It’s all good, Bill,” I said, never taking my eyes off my former friend. “We’re done. These two pathetic excuses of humanity are welcome to each other. But...” I grabbed Lewis under the chin and turned his head to face me. “The next bar you see me in, you will leave. The next time you see me on the street, you will turn around and walk away because if I see you first ... Not even Bill will be able to save you.” I shoved him back onto the floor again, pulled out a few notes for Bill with an apologetic look to cover any damages, and – for the second time in as many hours – walked out the door.

It was funny. The day before, Bill, Lewis, and Sarah would have called me a nice guy, a gentle giant. The predilection for a temper, let alone actual violence, was simply not something that was in me. It is surprising what a man can be driven to. I was just happy to be out of a situation that I didn’t even know I was in.

Hey Stacy, It’s Dan. I just wanted to get a message to you quickly before the rumors, lies, and/or excuses start. Lewis will be coming home at some point today with at least a black eye, probably more. We got into a fight at Bill’s. In the interest of giving you the truth that I know you won’t get from him, I punched him because I found out that your husband has been having an affair with my wife for the better part of a year, if not longer. Get a lawyer! If you can’t afford a lawyer, let me know, and I will pay for it.

There are also some things that might give you a head start. Lewis keeps a bag in the back of your daughter’s closet. He calls it his bug-out bag. I thought it was a joke, but he said it was for when you found out about the other women he had on the side, and he could get out quickly ... I’m guessing it wasn’t as much of a joke as I thought. There is cash in there, I suggest you take it. He also has a ‘secret bank account.’ I’m not sure how much, but I know he has a fair amount tucked away in there too. I don’t know the details, but a decent lawyer will be able to find them.

I wish I had the strength to do this in person or even on call. I’m not proud that it has to be by text, but I think you can probably understand how I am feeling right about now. I am so sorry that it had to happen at all. If you need anything, anything at all, for you or the girls, please let me know, and it is yours.

I should have felt bad when I hit send and tucked my phone back into my pocket. There was a part of me, however small, that felt like I was flushing a couple of decades worth of friendship down the pan, that felt like I was responsible for everything that had happened. The rest of me knew better. A few quick phone calls to the bank had canceled all the rest of the credit cards, except the ones I knew were in my wallet, and another to my lawyer started the divorce proceedings and changed my will to make sure that if I drank myself to death, she would get nothing. My money could be split between my parents and my brother. That bitch would die in destitution before I gave her a penny.

I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re wondering about the spiteful, vengeful, soulless excuse for a man sitting at a bar in the airport with little idea of how, or why he had come to the conclusion to go there. For the record, the logic was simple: I had leave that my boss had been begging me to take, one phone call got me as much of it as I needed, and I decided I needed to get away. The distance of that “away” could only be achieved with the utilization of civilian aviation ... so the airport seemed like a good choice. Most of my shit was in my car in long-stay parking. I’d swapped out enough of my clothes to fill a small travel bag, I had gone to the ticket desk, asked to go somewhere hot, paid the fee, and here I was. I wasn’t even entirely sure where I was supposed to be going. All I knew was that my flight left at eight from gate three ... And gate three was right next to the bar.

Music. To. My. Ears.

Alright, I think we are far enough along here to set a few things straight. I had hoped to do this when my patience was a little less frayed and my mood a little less homicidal, but I have a plane to wait for, and this does not seem to be the opportune time to get drunk.

Let’s start at the beginning. As you may have guessed, My name is Dan. I am a 35-year-old, soon-to-be-divorced guy from a town you have never heard of in the midwest ... the cold part of the midwest, just to be clear. What I do for a living is a little complicated. On paper, I would be called a structural engineer, but in practice, there is a little more to it than that. Essentially what I do is build self-sufficient, eco-friendly houses and small office buildings. That sounds a lot more complicated than it is, but my personal role in all that is part engineer, part architect, part builder, and part accountant. It’s the sort of job that makes people’s eyes glaze over when you tell them about it. I get paid well for my work, and I live comfortably.

Or I used to live comfortably..., or I will live comfortably.

Whatever ... There is comfort involved at some point in my living experience.

What the recently unconscious Lewis failed to appreciate is that far from being a desk jockey, my work was primarily spent on construction sites, where if I wasn’t supervising construction, I was actively participating. And if I wasn’t helping with the building, I was slogging shit around the worksite like a manual laborer. Eight hours a day, five days a week, every week of the year apart from Christmas, and multiply that by more than fifteen years of hard graft. That equated to the sort of workout regime that some men spend eye-watering amounts of gym time to achieve. So not only was I a little over 6 feet tall, I was in peak physical condition. My body wasn’t covered in rippling muscles, but they were there, and unlike the gym guys, these ones were not just for show. They worked ... as Lewis’s face had recently discovered.

I still couldn’t decide if I should feel bad about that.

I mean, I don’t. Not even a little bit, but I am aware that I probably should.

Before the phone call from the credit card company, I would normally have been described as a laid-back, easy-going guy with a good sense of humor and a head of jet black hair that stubbornly refused to adhere to any recognizable style. My hair grew extraordinarily fast, but it all seemed to want to grow ‘out.’ As my former wife joked, I was a prime candidate for an afro. When I was younger, I tried to grow it long, but no matter the weight or length of my hair, it abjectly refused to fold under its own weight. I had given up and shaved it all off ... right down to the wood. It was then that I discovered that I have a fairly odd-shaped head, and the bald look was no better for me than the afro.

The rest of my head seemed to follow the same principles. My face is not ugly but seems to be too far removed from any aesthetically pleasing pattern to be called handsome. On a scale of one to ten, I would be a solid five. That isn’t self-depreciation or lack of confidence; that is just a simple acceptance of the realities. I’m the personality guy. Someone has to be, and that someone was me. I would never drop panties at 50 paces, but I could make a girl laugh until she peed herself. I had been told that was more important. For the sake of fair comparison, Lewis, the asshole, was a safe eight on that scale. That tells you all you need to know about where a lot of women stand on the looks versus personality argument. Stacy, his wife, was possibly one of the most stunning women I had ever seen, even compared to Sarah, who was hardly a slouch on that scale herself. What was worse, Stacy was one of the most decent, funny, and all-round nice women I knew. Even so, Lewis had cheated on a woman that most guys would sell body parts to date, and Sarah had shown about as much loyalty as one of those sharks who eat their siblings in-utero. Recent events had given me the impression that I was not the best judge of character.

Fuck, Lewis had kids. Who the fuck does that to his kids?? My taste in the people I spent time with was starting to look a little less than stellar.

Back to the point, I was a tall, well-built guy with a fairly average head balanced precariously atop his shoulders. Inside that head was a man with what I would like to think was a decent character, a good personality, a well-paying job, a good work ethic, and a somewhat sketchy bullshit detector.

But one with a 100% knock-out record in bar fights.

One for one ... Go me.

When it comes down to brass tacks, what I say about myself doesn’t really matter; it is up to you to decide for yourself whether you think I am a good guy or not. I’m just going to tell my story and let you make up your own minds. I will, however, concede that so far, you have seen me mercilessly walk out on my wife, punch my best friend in the face, possibly destroy said best friend’s marriage, and spend a lot of time in bars. I am aware that I am not off to the best of starts.

They say that before you judge a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes ... That way, when you do judge him, you are a mile away, and you have his shoes. Just a little something to bear in mind.

I took another sip of my coke and looked around the bar. The barman, a man with as much customer service enthusiasm as the damp cloth stupidly hung over his shoulder, looked back at me with an air of contempt, as if he was doing me a favor by ... holy shit, I really was in a bad mood. I needed to stretch my legs. I downed the rest of my drink, paid the exact sum on the bill, purposely not leaving a tip to the guy who apparently didn’t want one, and headed out into the main lounge.

It was a typical international airport; lots of stores, lots of people, lots of noise, and nowhere near enough seating. I looked up to the information board, scanning down to find my flight number and noting gratefully that it was due to arrive on schedule. I took exactly three steps forward before something hard hit me square in the forehead.

I looked down as the offending object clattered around my feet. A plastic elephant staring back up at you is not the sort of thing that will ever sit well with the kind of day I was having. I looked to my right to glare playfully at the offending, giggling little boy, maybe four years old, and his mortified-looking mother. I looked back down at the elephant ... The elephant had rolled to the side to stare at some random spot on the far wall.

“Dammit, Jonny, I told you no throwing. Do I need to put him in the bag until we get there?” the mother whispered, her voice almost hissing with embarrassment before she turned to me. “I am SO sorry! I don’t know why he throws it so much.”

I smiled at her, giving her a little bit of a wink before bending over and retrieving the plastic toy, stepping over to little Jonny, and stooping down to eye level with him. “Your friend is not very good at flying. He crashed into my head!”

Jonny giggled

“Look, right there!” I said, making an exaggerated gesture of pulling my hair out of the way and showing him my head. “I think it’s broken. Is it bleeding?”

Jonny giggled again and shook his head.

“Are you sure? It feels wet.”

Jonny kept giggling and nodded more energetically than any nod deserved.

“That means ... That means your elephant LICKED ME!! Ewwwwwwwww, that’s gross!” even the mother stifled a giggle at that one.

“No, he didn’t.” Little Jonny drawled between fits of laughter.

“Then why is my head wet?”

“I don’t knowwww”

“Hmmmm ... So what is your flying Elephant’s name.”

“Ellie.” he giggled

“Ellie the Elephant, that’s a good name. Any relation to Nellie?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. I don’t think Ellie is very good at flying. Shall we listen to your mom and keep her nice and safe and let the pilots do the flying instead? It might stop her licking people’s heads.”

Jonny nodded with a grin, taking back the beloved toy as I handed it to him. His mother smiled warmly and appreciatively at me as I flashed her another smile in return. She mouthed the words “thank you” to me before turning her attention back to her son. I stood back up, decided that the main lounge was far too dangerous, and headed back to the bar.

Look! I am a newly single guy, in my mid-thirties, traveling alone. I planned on spending a lot of time in bars: Bars, pools, nudist beaches ... Hell, if I could find a pool bar at a nudist beach, I might be at serious risk of spontaneous combustion!

Having spent most of my working life waiting for something or another to be delivered to the work site, or waiting for some form of concrete or cement to set, waiting was something I was very familiar with, and so the next ninety minutes or so passed reasonably uneventfully, if not quickly. But soon enough, the overly friendly voice warbled through the tannoy system to announce that my flight had started boarding. I grabbed my bag, paid my bar tab, nodded to the thoroughly unimpressed looking bar-boy, and headed to my gate.

A short while later, I was handing my ticket to the pretty stewardess with a little too much make-up than could be considered healthy and was directed to my seat on the surprisingly empty flight. This was technically the red eye. It may have been scheduled to depart at eight, but with a fourteen-hour flying time over the pacific, it was not the most desirable of flight options. That didn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, I could hope to sleep for more than half of it, which made it ideal. Other people obviously didn’t share my logic, though, because I was the only person sitting in my bank of three seats.

I always liked the window seat too.

With my bag stowed in one of the overhead compartments, I made myself comfortable, or at least as comfortable as it was possible to get on a plane, and watched the last of the passengers boarding. A short time later, the safety briefing started. I know it’s a cliche on flights, and lots of people fly so often that they don’t pay much attention to them. However, I hadn’t flown in years, so I took note of everything being said. It didn’t hurt that the stewardess giving out the briefing was fucking hot! The brunette who had welcomed me on board was somewhere behind me, further into the aircraft. She had been short, stacked, and unbearably cute looking. She looked like a girl who would giggle a lot. The one in front of me was taller, a little less busty, but had a mane of fiery red hair, flawless pale skin, and a smattering of freckles dusting her cheeks.

A small part of me felt bad for looking, still in that “spoken for and shouldn’t be gawking” mentality. But a much larger part of me slapped that smaller part and reminded it - and me - that we were now young (ish), free and single, and could look as much as we damn well like, at least until it started becoming creepy.

My phone buzzed in my pocket as I watched her. I ignored it.

The stewardess must have heard it because her eyes flicked to me with a smile as she continued with a very apt part of the briefing. “Cell phones are allowed on this flight, and access to the plane’s very own wifi system can be purchased from the duty-free service. All phones, however, must be turned off or put into flight mode during take-off and landing. Announcements will be made by the cabin crew to let you know when cell phones are safe to be used.”

My phone buzzed again ... I kept ignoring it.

The stewardess’s grin widened as I cringed at the almost continuous series of buzzes coming from my jeans pocket, but she continued on with the safety briefing like the professional she was, seemingly grateful that I was still paying attention rather than ignoring her like so many others often did. She stepped forward and leaned over the back of the seats in front of me after she had finished.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” She smiled beautifully. “We have about twenty minutes before we start to taxi. I’ll let you know when you have to turn it off.”

“That would be great, thank you...” I paused for her name.

“Hayley,” She smiled, holding my eye.

“Thank you, Hayley,” I replied, holding hers with as much confidence as I could muster.

She winked as she straightened herself up. “I’ll be back to check on you in a bit, Mister Popular,” she called over her shoulder to me as she sauntered off up the aisle towards the rear of the plane.

It took every single shred of my self-control not to turn around to check out her ass as she walked away. I pulled out my phone, and unsurprisingly almost all the messages were from Sarah.

There was a little bit of a gap in the time between that message and the next. But the message that followed was as predictable as it was pathetic. I could almost hear her thinking, “half of that money was mine. Oh, wait, no, it wasn’t. That’s okay. I’ll just use the credit card. Shit, I can’t. It was maxed out and deactivated. What am I going to do?” What she failed to realize was that my lawyer would be salivating over the “I am going to end things with Lewis” part. It didn’t matter what she said during the divorce proceedings. I had her admission, in writing, that she had been having an affair. I took a screenshot of the message thread and forwarded it in an email to my lawyer, along with written confirmation of the change of my will and my intent to get divorce papers served, before finally reading the last of her messages.

Baby, I’m so sorry, please come home. I love you.

I stifled the snorted laugh, took a deep breath, and started typing. The plane around me jolted a little as it was slowly dragged away from the gate.

Sarah, this is the last time you are ever going to hear from me without a lawyer being present. I am not coming back, I am not going to forgive you, and pretending you love me so you can keep living in the lifestyle that I provided is fooling nobody. If you loved me at all, you wouldn’t have spent the last year fucking my friend behind my back. I am not going to call you names, you are not worth it, but I have no doubt that between Stacy and Bill, everyone is going to know what happened within a few days. If they want to call you a slut, a whore, an ungrateful, lying, deceitful little bitch, or any of the other names that you absolutely deserve, that is up to them.