Chapter 2

She told me the dates and I had no further questions.

The strange feeling that evening she forgot to call Emelie and the clue that something was wrong had never left me and the short arguing we had that night could hardly be the whole reason to abandon the family during our summer vacation.

We didn't do any arguing after she told me about her extra summer job. Our relationship was polite and correct but no attempts were made to show any kind of love. Our sex life was down to zero and I got the feeling that both of us waited for her departure time as a release.

Chris and I shared a PC at home and of course it was as clean as expected. No strange numbers were called on the phone and she had begun to lay her cell phone in the kitchen, just as if she wanted me to examine it, which I never did.

She left as expected. The kids and I took her to the airport; she gave all of us a hug, checked in and was gone.

Chris had gotten a furnished two-room apartment, without rent and close to the hospital. She made a short call when she arrived there and promised to call us the next day when she had got her working schedule.

Her schedule came as a fax to my office together with a short handwritten message that the job was fine and she would not call every day and her cell phone would be switched off most of the time but we could leave text or voice messages to it if we wanted her to call us in some urgent matter. Not a word about, "I miss you or I love you."

It was our son who came up with the suggestion that we ought to take a trip to visit mom and stay in her apartment for a few days. Even our daughter was into it; we could rent a car and go to the Norwegian coast for a whale safari. And coach tours deep into an Iron mine. I accepted if they promised not to say a word to mom.

We left on Thursday morning with an express train to the capital where we caught the flight to our destination. There we had a rented Volvo XC90 waiting for us at the airport, just in case we would get into bad mountain roads. Just before boarding the plane, I sent Chris a voice message to her cell phone, told her that the trip was our kids' suggestion and asked for the address to her apartment.

After landing and getting the car I checked my cell phone for messages from Chris and there was a voice message. She sounded more angry than happy to get a visit from her family. However, she told us the address and that she would work overtime to six o'clock P.M. and that we could get a key to her apartment in the hospital reception.

It didn't take me many minutes after we had got into the apartment to see that Chris hadn't been living there during her four nights in the north. Almost all her clothes were in her suitcase in the bedroom where the bed looked unused. No nightgown under the pillow. Very strange, indeed, because she always used to put the clothes on hangers in the wardrobe and in the drawers as the first thing she did when we came to a hotel for a week. I got the impression that she had brought the suitcase here in a hurry during her lunch break.

Nothing in the garbage bag, the dishwasher not used, no traces of use in the bathroom. I decided not to show any suspicion to the children or not mention anything to Chris. No reason to make a mess of the children's holiday trip

Chris rang and told me that she had eaten all her meals at the hospital, so there was no food at the apartment and asked us to go shopping for breakfast and eat our dinner in town. We did and came back to the apartment some time after her and I saw that she had emptied her suitcase into the wardrobe and drawers.

The children greeted Chris with joy and even she had a happy expression in her face. It was a nice sunny evening and we decided on a trip to a hill to watch the midnight sun. Chris came with us and we acted like an average family. She went to her job early in the morning and rang me during the day and said that she had cancelled a planned hike with some fellow workers during the weekend and would came with us to the whale safari at Atlantic ocean outside the Norwegian coast. The kids became very happy about her decision.

The kids and I spent much time at a guided coach tour deep down and several kilometers on a paved road into one of the largest iron mines in the world, where deep in the mountain there was a demonstration of huge drilling equipment. It was a busy but interesting day for the kids and me, indeed. I even had time to make a quick stop at an estate brokers office in town for a chat with a collogue. That guy was a native of the town and with his job he knew a lot of people, especially at the hospital because his wife was a secretary there and very tuned to the local gossip. He promised that it would be a piece of cake to find out who among the single doctors or administration top jocks had gotten into a relationship with a handsome X-ray nurse from the south who was living at his place for the time being. Some days are great days and I had hopefully solved one of my pains in the ass easier than expected.

Our two days' tour to Norway and the whale safari was a great and memorable event because I knew that it was the last time the four of us would do anything as a family. I did my best to be polite and correct with Chris. I think she felt the same because at one moment I was sure that I saw tears in her eyes. I think she had regrets about her doings but she understood that I had seen too many clues in her apartment. To my great relief we got a four-bed family room at a small hotel so there was never any question about sex, which Chris and I had avoided since the day before her conference.

I did really hope that her new boyfriend was so good for her that he was worth the problems to come. If he was a native of the north, there was no chance she could get him to move to our town in the south so we could have divided custody of the children. If she preferred to stay in the north with him, I would never let her take my children with her. If she intended to do that against the children's wishes, I would fight it with the best lawyers in the country. I doubted that Chris would be happy to live 1000 kilometers from her children and see them only a few times a year.

An another guess was that Chris regarded me as a such wimp that though I must understood that she had been living somewhere other than in her apartment I would pretend not to see anything and take her back with open arms when her month long affair was over. It would be an advantage for me in my attempts to solve this matter if Chris regarded me as a wimp.

The whale-safari was a great event because we saw several whales and came rather close to some of them. Chris and I forgot our problems and acted like a happy couple for a while. I think that much of her fear for a serious quarrel had left her because on the road back to her apartment she even asked me about my plans for the big birthday party I had promised her. My reply, "Yes, I have been working on it and will tell you a bit more next weekend," didn't gave her much information.

On Monday morning, Chris left for work and the kids and I went on a one-day hike on what they called a "family path" in the wilderness.

The kids and I caught the first flight home on Thursday morning. Chris gave me a hug when we parted. I hugged her back and gave her a kiss, which surprised her but I thought that would seal the happy days in our marriage.

Back at the airport I rang my collogue and thanked him for the information I had gotten in his text message. I didn't say no when he offered to drive past the doctor's house in the evening and see if Chris' blue Ford Focus was parked on the driveway.

Back home the kids rang Chris in the evening and talked a long time with her until she lost battery capacity in her cell phone. My northern friend sent me a text message at ten o'clock, "Her car is there."

What else could I expect? I had kept Chris away from his cock for five nights and now they obviously were horny as hell.

One of my employees who worked that week promised to stay in my house from Thursday to Friday with my kids when I told her the truth about the reason for my business trip. She had watched my kids a few times before when I had been away on quickly arranged business trips. I told the children that I had to see a huge summerhouse, in case their mom asked where I was gone.

Several hours later I was back in the north. This time I had rented a blue Ford Focus just as Chris' so no neighbors would be suspicious when I visited her apartment. I had programmed my GPS with the doctor's address so it was easy to find his house in one of the better areas in town. Chris' Focus was in the driveway just as I expected. I had seen what I wanted to see and drove to her apartment.

Inside I saw that it was almost as it was when the kids and I left it on Tuesday morning. She had not wasted any time with cleaning. The only difference was that Chris' suitcase and her clothes were missing.

I spent the night in her apartment and left early in the morning for the doctor's address. Chris' Focus stood in the driveway exactly as it had the previous evening. I parked on the street outside his driveway, went to the front door and rang the doorbell.

To my luck there was no peephole in the massive door.

After several minutes a man in a blue nightgown opened the door. It was a black-haired man my own age and when he asked what I wanted, I simply told him, "I have an urgent letter to my wife."

He got a surprised look on his face and replied, "Wrong address, nobody's wife is here."

I pushed him hard so he fell on the floor and rushed past him. Within seconds I had found the master bedroom and there, under a blanket I found my lovely and, until recently, beloved wife Christine, who began to scream when she recognized that it was me who had entered the bedroom.

I gripped the blanket, dragged it off her and saw that she was naked. I laid my brown envelope with the divorce papers between her legs and shouted, "Here is your birthday present, you cheap, shameless damn cheating whore."

Then I left the bedroom and met the doctor in the doorway. He stepped aside and made no attempt to stop me when I passed him and left his house.