Chapter Text
Daniel and Celeste Molloy were no role models of how to keep a marriage. How to continue having lives together even when most of the time all they did was get in each other's way. But in Daniel’s mind they had made it work, a fling in what most would deem middle age had led to conversations of a fear of dying alone and spiralled into a proposal with no ring and no real passion. Unless they were in the bedroom.
Daniel’s career in journalism had begun in his early twenties and had carried on successfully to present day, known in the field for his brash probing questions paired with an icy demeanor. Some say it made for a perfect reporter, his boss saw it as an eventual reason for him to be fired. Celeste tried many areas of work, relying on his income to support her in between jobs. He never minded, at least she needed him for something.
Children were never an avenue for them, Daniel too busy with work and Celeste turning her nose up whenever she spotted rugrats running around. He felt the need to remind her that the world wasn’t gonna stop having kids because her prissiness couldn’t handle it. That particular comment had him on the sofa with a crooked spine for three weeks.
Anyway, the point is that although they weren’t exactly ecstatic to be together 24/7, Daniel was under the impression that, at the very least, their marriage was strong enough to survive the usual fates. He was, in fact, absolutely wrong.
It arrived on a Wednesday. Possibly the most unremarkable day of the week, suspended in wait between the beginning and the end, when nothing of consequence should happen. Daniel Molloy never usually brought in the mail, not consciously anyway, too entranced in whatever new story he had cooked up. Today though, he had submitted the piece early, the article was nothing special but his boss had been nagging at him since the weekend so Daniel had ensured it was in. He had been sitting idly on the sofa, kicking his feet with nothing to do when the doorbell sounded.
He didn’t notice it at first, taking the stack back to the sofa and switching on the tv. He had found it nestled neatly between a utility bill, prices had gone up for the third time that year, and a flyer for a new yoga studio that had opened two blocks over. The envelope was thick, cream colored, and handwritten with oddly perfect cursive. No return address. He almost didn’t open it. Some would find it odd that a man who spent his life asking questions, interviewing ghosts of the past or chronicling things others would rather forget, had become surprisingly incurious about his own life.
But curiosity, like rot, starts subtly.
The first thing he knew was that the handwriting didn’t belong to Celeste. That woman’s writing should be studied because Daniel is sure she just carts scribbles on the page, looping and unbearably soft. That was the thing that stuck, like all his cases, a hook that couldn’t be removed, the clue that niggled at his mind until he couldn’t stand it. No, this writing was elegant, perfectly slanted in italics, and effortlessly precise. Definitively Male.
His fingertips, that had been tapping a smooth rhythm against the arm of his chair, stuttered to a stop. They tingled with curiosity and before he could take in his actions the letter opener was slicing into the paper envelope. Inside, a single folded page. No greeting. No signature. Just a single line in the same perfect handwriting:
“She’s lying to you.”
Daniel sat down the metal zip of a decorative cushion, Celeste insisted made the space more homely, eating into his back. He read it once, eyes squinting, his glasses forgotten on his work desk. Then twice. The ink was jet black and no doubt expensive. The kind that soaked deep into the page and stayed there, not bleeding out around the parchment like an untreated wound.
He laughed, softly at first, then a little louder in blatant disbelief. Ridiculous. Juvenile. Some prank it had to be. A misdelivered confession. Or maybe just an attempt to rattle him by someone with too much time and far too little tact. Daniel could see the taunting, smiling faces of work colleagues, hands biting into his shoulders and jeering him with ‘Gotcha!’s.
Celeste was in the shower. He could hear the soft trickles of water behind the closed door, the familiar off-key hum she always sang, some French melody she never named. Daniel couldn’t remember her ever going to France. In the reflection of the hallway mirror, intricate and golden, he caught a glimpse of himself. His head of entirely grey hair tousled, his shirt rumpled from falling asleep at his desk, the indent of a computer key faintly hidden in his wrinkled cheek. The kind of man women once called ‘distinguished and handsome’ now simply ‘tired and worn’
He placed the letter in the locked drawer beneath his desk and closed it with an unnecessary amount of care.
By Friday evening, the lone envelope was joined by three more.
Each cutting deeper into his chest than the last. None directly accusatory, but they didn’t have to be. Daniel knew Celeste wasn’t entirely in their marriage any longer, and he couldn’t say he was either. But the thought of another man having her whilst her wedding ring still sat firmly on her finger, her hand carting through a stranger's hair gripping tight and moaning.
The language grew ever more intimate than the last. Specific secrets known only to Daniel, or so he had thought. One mentioned the small scar above Celeste’s left thigh, jagged from a piece of glass that had embedded itself there in childhood. Another referenced a pastel blue dress with dotted daisy’s, one that she hadn't worn in months. The one Daniel used to say made her look like she belonged in a painting while he kissed up her neck and tore it off of her.
The fourth came with a photograph.
Undeniable evidence laying before him in black and white. Grainy but indisputable. Celeste sat at a café, knees crossed, smiling across the table at someone whose face was obscured by a blur of movement. Perhaps that was intentional. The man’s hand rested gently atop of her own, the fingers were long, stupidly elegant. There was something almost theatrical in the gesture, like the beginning of a magic trick, like he was putting on a show.
Daniel stared at that hand for a long time.
His resolve didn’t hold out long and by Sunday, the thoughts had chipped away at his mind for too long. The journalistic instincts within him were begging to be set free, so he followed her. Not because he didn’t believe the letters, he had no choice, but because he needed to see it himself. Needed to confirm that the dirt crumbling beneath his feet was real, and not just the inevitable erosion of a marriage pushed too many years past its final season.
She went out at dusk, it was something that she often did. Daniel wondered how long it had been going on, if there were others. She said she was meeting a friend from college and Daniel smiled, told her to enjoy herself, kissed her cheek, and fronted like a man who wasn’t attempting to memorise every movement she made when she lied directly to his face.
He waited two uncomfortable minutes, pacing a hole in the wooden floorboards, before slipping on his coat.She walked briskly, but not hurried. There was purpose to her stride, an air of excitement, something he hadn’t seen in years. She wore the blue dress. He laughed to himself, of course she did.
He followed at a distance, far enough away to be encased in shadow should she turn around but close enough to see the slight jump in her steps. They walked through streets bathed in amber light, Past shuttered storefronts and couples with hands clasped tightly together. The city was beginning to breathe in the cool of autumn, and Daniel’s breath followed suit. Shallow and ever so sharp.
She entered a narrow doorway beneath a rusted iron balcony, the kind that curled like ivy over the second story windows. No sign. No name. Just a single flickering lamp above the door, It didn’t look like a restaurant. Nor a gallery. It didn’t look like much of anything really.
Daniel waited beneath a broken lamp post across the street, his heart rattling against the ribs in his chest like a prisoner begging to be let out. Twenty painfully slow minutes passed.
Then he emerged.
The man from the photograph.
You could tell everything and yet nothing about him from the way a man exited a room. He was young, golden skinned and far more beautiful than Daniel ever had been. So his wife had a thing for twinks, at least he now knows why their marriage didn’t work out. He walked as if he’d been summoned by a royal invitation only he could hear. Tailored coat. A scarf slung loosely around his neck, Adam’s apple prominent beckoning Daniel closer. Odd honey yellow eyes scanning the street, not with caution, but with interest. A predator on a stroll waiting for a dumb enough piece of prey to jump before him.
He looked... unreal.
As if someone had reached into the pages of a historical tragic novel and pulled him forward into the present, dressed him head to toe in robes of silk and sin, and set him loose into the world. Daniel’s breath hitched in the back of his throat as he watched the man light a cigarette and exhale the smoke slowly, sensually.
Then, God help him, he smiled. Not at anyone in particular. Just to himself, wide and toothy, as though remembering something sweet. He turned on his patent leather heel and began walking down east toward the river.
And Daniel, staggering forward, felt his feet begin to follow.
He told himself it was about closure. About his wife. That he needed, more than life itself, to understand what kind of man she had given herself to. What Daniel had lacked so badly, she had cheated instead of simply asking for a divorce. Daniel would’ve given it to her, no questions or rudimentary arguments of why the twenty years they shared should last. Maybe it was about their house, he mused silently, she sure put more effort into decorating that than she did in anything with him. He pretended it was because he needed to know whether it had been worth it.
But even then, somewhere deep beneath the marrow in his bones, he knew that wasn’t the truth. Following the man had nothing to do with Celeste. Nothing to do with the life that she had blown up. He had followed because the moment his eyes met the other man’s from across the street, as brief as it was, he saw something impossible in that man’s gaze:
Recognition.
Like they’d met before.
Like the man had been waiting for him.
And Daniel, ever the journalist, needed to know why.