The Woman At The Door by Daniel Hurst (books successful people read .TXT) 📕

just waiting on a new model to come through for us. But we should have the figures for you tomorrow, if that’s okay?’

I look up at the woman who has just tried to save my bacon and see Maria nodding her head at me as if I’m supposed to agree with the little lie she has just told.

‘Tomorrow it is then,’ Ed says, closing the file that was open in front of him. ‘9 AM in my office.’

With that, the meeting comes to an abrupt end, and everybody gets up from their seats to leave the room. I gather up my paperwork, which proved to be of no help to me whatsoever during that meeting because I hadn’t been listening to a word anybody had been saying, and head for the door, where Maria is already waiting for me. As everybody else leaves, she closes the door behind them and turns to look at me with some concern on her face.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Yeah, fine. Why?’ I reply quickly, but probably a little too quickly for it to be convincing.

I know that I’m a terrible liar, but I’d rather try and make out like everything is fine than admit to my colleague that my marriage is falling apart and I’m currently living in disgrace in a hotel room with sticky stains on the carpet.

‘You seemed distracted in the meeting. I wasn’t sure what was going on with you.’

I realise then that I haven’t thanked Maria for helping me out during the meeting with her intervention when the eyes of my boss and his fellow board members were on me. If she hadn’t interrupted then things could have been very awkward for me indeed because Ed would most likely have realised that I hadn’t been paying attention to him, nor had I done the work that I was supposed to have done before the meeting began.

‘Thank you for what you just did then,’ I say to Maria. ‘You didn’t have to try and cover for me.’

‘I know I didn’t, but we’re teammates and we’ve got to look out for each other, right?’

I smile and nod my head. ‘Right.’

Maria gives me that dazzling smile of hers, the one that gets the rest of the men in the office all worked up when she shows it to them, before she reaches out for the handle to open the door again.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I say just before she can.

‘Sure.’

I take a deep breath before asking the question, mainly because I’m a little nervous about what the answer might be.

‘What would you do if you thought your partner was cheating on you?’

Maria looks surprised by the question, and I’m just about to tell her to ignore me and go for the door when she answers.

‘I’d get rid of them, I suppose.’

That’s fair enough, and I’d kind of been expecting that answer.

‘But what if they hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and it just seemed like they had.’

‘You mean what if they weren’t cheating, but I thought they were?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know. That’s a tough one. I guess it comes down to trust then, doesn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if all the evidence is pointing in one direction, the only way I could ignore it would be if I trusted my partner more than I trusted the evidence.’

I think about Maria’s words, but I don’t have to think about them for long because they seem fairly straightforward. If Rebecca has told me to leave, it means that she trusts the evidence over me. That’s either because the evidence is too strong, which I’m not sure it is, or it’s because her level of trust in me was not as high as it could have been to start with. My wife is looking at me like I’m the bad guy, but maybe she is to blame too because here I am, as innocent as the day we first met, yet she doesn’t trust me.

What does that say about her?

‘What’s this about?’ Maria asks me after I have failed to respond to her. ‘Has something happened at home?’

‘At my home? No, of course not,’ I lie, trying to laugh to show how ridiculous an idea that is. ‘It’s just a friend. I’m trying to help him out with his wife.’

‘Oh, I see. A friend. That’s a shame. I hope everything works out okay.’

Maria gives me that smile again before opening the door and leaving the room, and while I’m not entirely sure that she believes my question was about a friend’s marriage rather than my own, I appreciate the fact that she didn’t probe any further.

I’m about to follow her out of the room when I decide to make a quick check on my phone to see if Rebecca has made any attempt to get in contact with me. I’m not going to call her again right now or send any more messages this morning, but I’m hoping that she has got back to me to at least let me know that she is okay. But there are still no notifications from her, which is not a good sign. But there is a notification from somebody else on my phone screen.

I have a missed call from the private investigator.

Closing the boardroom door, I put my phone to my ear as I call Erica back, my heart beginning to race in my chest as I wonder what it could be that she has to tell me. Has she made a breakthrough in her investigation into the mystery woman at the door? Does she have a name for me, or even better, does she know where I can find this woman right now? Or has she exhausted all avenues and come up dry, contacting me to simply say that she is not going to be able to help me track down that woman and that there is nothing more she can do?

I hold my breath as I hear Erica pick up the phone and thank me for returning her call before