Chapter 21
Dear Adam
I’m a pretty together guy, if I say so myself – good job, great flat, nice car (it’s a Porsche Macan – far superior to the Cayenne in my humble opinion) and a wife who worships me. I never though I’d find myself writing to an agony uncle – but here we are.
Where to begin? I guess with my wife, who I just mentioned. She’s a great girl and like I say she worships me. I really don’t want to go anything to hurt her. But marriage isn’t turning out quite like I expected. We’re living in a city she doesn’t know well and she’s struggling to settle in. I’ve recently been promoted at work and I’m leading a team out here, so I need to prove myself, and that means putting in the hours, both in and out of the office. I’m putting the effort in to show my value to my managers and my direct reports, as well as the wider firm, and I’m doing pretty well at it if I say so myself.
When I got together with my now wife, I thought she was pretty sorted. She’s gorgeous and smart and sassy, and I thought she’d be a real asset to me in my life and career. But since we got married, she’s changed. She’s become really clingy and needy, and nothing I do seems to make her happy. I don’t know what her problem is – she’s got a great life here and doesn’t have to work beyond doing the basics to keep things ticking over at home and occasionally turning up on a night out and being a credit to me with my colleagues. But she doesn’t seem that interested in doing either of those things.
Normally, I’d let a lot of this slide – even the fact that our sex life hasn’t exactly been up to standard since we got back from honeymoon. But the problem is, at work I’ve run into an old girlfriend of mine. We split up when she got transferred to a different location, and I met my wife shortly after. But now my ex is back in my life, and if I’m honest I feel like I’ve made a mistake.
My ex is everything I thought my wife was – sassy, driven, sociable and of course hot. I never thought of myself as a cheater, but what if I just ended up with the wrong girl, and now I’ve got the opportunity to put that right? That wouldn’t really count as cheating, would it?
Help me out here, Adam. I want to do the right thing for myself.
Anonymous, Citizen of Nowhere
I read the email, then read it again. I could literally feel cold sweat breaking out on my palms, and my teeth were chattering even though the office was just as warm as usual. I stood up, my legs unsteady, and walked to the loo, locking myself in a cubicle, sitting on the closed toilet lid and shaking.
It’s Zack,one part of my mind screamed. It’s totally, one hundred per cent Zack.
It can’t be,said another part. It’s too much of a coincidence. He doesn’t even know Adam exists.
Come on, coincidences happen. And all the facts match – the wedding, the move to a different city, the car, the unhappy new wife. It’s Zack, and the wife is Amelie.
Nononono. It’s not possible.Mostly because if it were true, I’d have to do something about it, and I’ve got absolutely no idea what that could be.
Feeling like my brain had just been put through a smoothie-maker, I stood up again, unlocked the cubicle and washed my hands. My eyes stared back at me in the mirror, maybe a bit wider than usual but otherwise normal. My hair hadn’t abruptly turned white, or anything. But it didn’t feel that way – it felt like the whole landscape of my life had shifted, like when you arrive on a new level in a computer game and you’ve got to adjust to the fact that you’re not on the deck of a ship any more, but in the middle of a desert.
Still dazed, I returned to my desk, for once not noticing whether Ross was looking at me or not. I sat down and read the letter again, anger beginning to replace my shock. ‘Citizen of nowhere’ indeed. Who did he think he was?
And then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I knew. That phrase – ‘citizen of nowhere’. I remembered Zack using it months before, in his and Amelie’s London apartment. I’d suppressed an eye-roll at the time, because it was such an up-himself thing to say – not that anyone would have noticed. Zack never noticed anything I said or did, and when he was around Amelie seemed incapable of noticing anyone else.
I was as sure as I could possibly be that he’d written this letter to Adam. That the clingy, needy wife, in danger of being betrayed by her new husband, was my sister.
I remembered my conversation with her the previous day. She’d sounded so down, so unlike herself. ‘Nothing I do seems to make her happy.’ Yes, that sounded pretty much like the unfamiliar version of Amelie I’d encountered on our hour-long Facetime chat.
The Amelie I knew would be relishing life in a city known to be even more buzzy and exciting than London. She’d be booking shows and going to the kind of restaurants you had to spend hours glued to social media and then pounce in seconds to get a table at, and shopping till she dropped. She’d be making new friends at hot yoga classes and going for runs in Central Park.
She wouldn’t be moping alone in her apartment – unless something was very wrong.
Unlike me, Amelie understood men. If her husband’s head had been turned, if he was having – or even considering – an affair, she’d know about it.
But would she know what to do about it? It was so huge, such an unexpected betrayal on such a grand scale, after such a short time, I suspected not. I imagined that anyone, even my savvy, take-no-prisoners sister, would be blindsided, paralysed by what she knew or suspected.
She needed help. She needed me.
But I didn’t know what to do.
But you’ve got a secret weapon, Lucy. Remember?
I felt a trickle of relief. I had the oracle of GenBot 2.0, Adam’s virtual assistant, which I turned to to solve problems I couldn’t deal with on my own, and this one was the very definition of that.
I tapped on the tab, kept permanently open on my browser. There was the blank window at the bottom of the screen, and basically the whole of human knowledge waiting in the background to help me.
I typed – making a few mistakes, because my hands were still unsteady and I had to delete and try again – ‘I think my sister’s husband is having an affair. What should I do?’
As always, the answer took just seconds to appear and, as always, the response was comprehensive but concise.
This is a complex and worrying situation. If your suspicions are correct, it could have serious implications for both your sister and her husband, it said.
As usual, it then presented its advice in a numbered list. I skimmed the points rapidly.
1. Gather evidence. Don’t confront your sister or her husband until you’re sure.
2. Communicate with your sister and listen to what she has to say before voicing your own suspicions and presenting her with the proof.
3. Respect her boundaries and privacy.
4. Consider counselling for yourself, and recommend it for your sister and her husband
5. Be there to support her.
It said I shouldn’t take sides. Ha – as if. If Zack was cheating on Amelie, there was only one possible side for me to be on, and it wasn’t Zack’s.
But gathering evidence was going to be more of a problem. When Amelie had first starting dating Zack, she’d shown me his social media pages, just so I could admire the chiselled jaw and designer suits of her new boyfriend. I remembered thinking at the time that I’d never seen a more anodyne, buttoned-up set of profiles in my life. Presumably Zack thought he was being professional – personally, I’d thought he just came across as dull.
But the point was, his online presence wasn’t going to give me the clues I needed. Gathering evidence was going to be hard. And so was being there to support her.
I was in London. Amelie and Zack were in New York.
It was a problem – but hardly an unsurmountable one.
Gather evidence. Be there for your sister.
The bot’s advice was clear, even though it hadn’t said so in so many words. I was going to have to go there. I was going to have to do what army generals do when national security is threatened and put boots on the ground.
And I was going to have to do it soon.
I could work remotely, I knew – people sometimes did, if they were on holiday and an emergency cropped up, or even if they just wanted extra time away without eating into their annual leave. Ross had, for the second week of his two-week jaunt to Croatia earlier in the year. There was even a clause in my contract about it – I”d just need Greg to sign off on it and given that I”d been consistently delivering my daily Ask Adam column since its frequency had been increased, I saw no reason why he’d refuse. I could afford a flight – just. I’d need somewhere to stay and someone to look after Astro.
The latter felt like more of a challenge. My neighbour, who I’d asked to drop in and feed the cat when I was away for Amelie’s wedding, had moved and I didn’t know the new person who’d moved in. I could ask Nush, but that would mean telling her why I was planning an urgent trip to New York, and she’d fly into a panic and probably want to come too, which would only delay things.
I needed someone who lived nearby. Someone who knew Astro. There was so much I needed to plan, and I needed to plan it fast.
I looked up from my screen. Opposite me, Ross was typing busily.
‘Ross?’
‘Hold on.’ His keyboard rattled for a few more moments, then stopped. ‘Lucy.’
‘Where’s good to stay in New York?’
‘Depends what you want. The Four Seasons, obviously, but that’s top dollar.’
‘Okay, where’s good and cheap?’
‘Brooklyn, maybe? I can help you find somewhere that’s not in a sketchy area, if you like.’
‘Thanks, that would be great.’
‘Why? Are you planning a holiday?’ Understanding dawned on his face. ‘To see your sister?’
‘That’s right. I think I need to go out there, like, now.’
‘Okay. Want to sit down after work and do some research? We could go for a coffee.’
“Thanks.’ Relief flooded me.
‘Oh and, Ross? There’s one other thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You remember Astro…’