Not Yet Yours

Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six

Harriet

I go behind the desk and sit down. I bounce up and down twice on the chair and then adjust it to my height. I was right about it being comfortable, it’s definitely more comfortable than the dining table chairs are. I pull the laptop toward me, fire it up, and open up the browser. I load my website and go into the control panel and then I spend an hour or so playing around with fonts and colors to get the perfect feel. When I’m finally happy with the font and colors chosen, I save my changes and close out of the control panel.

I go to the front end of the website and click around to see what the changes look like, and I smile to myself. It’s really starting to come together now and looking how I want it to. It’s been a definite labor of love, but I’m glad I’ve stuck with it, watched tutorials, and learned how to change things myself rather than hiring someone to do it for me. I did debate doing that, but then I would always be stuck paying someone every time I wanted to make even the simplest of changes because I wouldn’t know what to do and I would be scared to mess around with coding someone else had put in place.

I load my email next and answer a few queries. One is looking particularly promising, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to get an order for another bespoke piece from it. There are also a couple of emails thanking me for orders received and I get a glow inside from their lovely words. There are a ton of spam emails for things I didn’t subscribe to, and I delete all of those without even bothering to open them.

I shoot off replies to those emails that need them and then the others, I either delete or file away. I smile, pleased with myself when my inbox reaches zero. It is so rare for me these days that I take a moment to sit and look at my empty inbox. I love it when I get my inbox sorted like this, it makes me feel like I’m efficient and organized.

This is the point where I would load Facebook or something at home and waste a bit of time scrolling about on social media, but I decide that if I’m going to do that, I might as well use my cell phone and go back to the comfortable couch in the living room where I can stick a film or something on the TV for a bit of background noise too.

I close down the laptop. I’m just about to leave the office when I notice the pile of papers in a basket marked ‘to be filed’. I decide to be nice and help Liam out by filing them for him. I’m sure his system isn’t that complicated and anything I can’t work out where to put it, I’ll leave it. It will still save him a bit of time if I get through most of the sheets. And if I put something in the wrong place, he only has to ask me where it is. I feel like this isn’t the really important stuff anyway because that will surely be in Liam’s office in the hotel where it’s easily accessible to anyone who needs it. This is most likely the bits and pieces that a person needs to keep but doesn’t need to refer back to that often.

I pick up the top sheet of paper from the basket and see that it’s an invoice marked paid which makes me think it’s likely to go in some sort of file labeled finances or tax returns or something like that. I go over to the filing cabinet and look in the top drawer. That drawer seems to cover the first half of the alphabet and I can’t see anything with the word finance, so I try the second drawer. I find a file labeled tax return receipts and I slip the invoice into it. Boom. Just call me secretary.

The next couple are things specific to individual hotels and those are easy enough to file because each hotel has its own file and it’s just a matter of looking under the right letter to find the hotel name in question. I fly through those.

I keep going and it’s not long before I’m left with just one thing to file. It’s some sort of report, a survey on a building by the looks of it. It’s been stamped as rejected so I can only assume it’s a survey on a property that Liam considered buying but then decided against going through with the purchase for whatever reason. I don’t know where Liam would keep that. I’ve looked under M for miscellaneous, R for rejected, O for other, and N for no. I admit N for no was probably a bit of a stretch, but I was getting desperate by that point.

I know I could just do what I had originally planned to do with anything I was unsure of and just leave it in the basket for Liam to deal with, but when I thought of that, I expected to have quite a few bits I didn’t know what to do with and now I only have one, I want to be able to finish the job and it will only frustrate me to have one left over.

I’m not going to let this sheet of paper outwit me. It’s become a game of wits now. Well report, I say game on.

I guess I could file it by the first letter of its name like I have the ones Liam has bought and just leave him a little note explaining to him where he will find it if it’s in the wrong place, but before I commit to doing that, I decide to look in the third and final drawer that I haven’t been in. Maybe that drawer is dedicated to rejected properties and projects. Something tells me that’s going to be the answer because I can’t imagine why anyone would file the surveys for properties they passed on buying with surveys for the hotels they did buy, and it wouldn’t make sense for Liam to have a whole file dedicated to each property he chose not to invest in.

I bend down and open the drawer and I giggle when I see the name on the one file that is in there; ‘stuff I have been told I need to keep but will probably never look at again’. It definitely sounds like the place for this last piece of filing.

I open the file and flick through it, looking for something similar to the sheet I have in my hand so that I can make sure it is the right place for it before I put it in there. I spot a few other things with rejected stamped on them and that convinces me that it is indeed the right place, and so I put the last bit of the filing into that file. As I close the file, it flops over and shows me the very last piece of paper in it and then the back cover flops down covering it up. I go cold inside when I see that last document in the file. But no. It can’t be what I thought it was. It flicked past so quickly I must have been wrong about what I thought I saw. Yes, that’s it. I was obviously wrong.

I don’t feel any better for telling myself that. I know what I want to do. I want to put the file back away and leave the office and just pretend like I’ve never seen it. But I also know that I won’t be able to do that, because now I have seen something, I have to know if it’s what I think it is or not. Because not knowing for sure will eat away at me and destroy our relationship as sure as me being right about this will. I just need to take a quick look and see that I was totally wrong and then have a laugh at myself for being so silly and dramatic.

I take a deep, steadying breath and I open the file to the back page. I’m prepared for this, I tell myself, but the truth is, I am not ready for this. Not even a little bit, and as soon as I see it again, I feel red-hot bile rising in my throat, but I manage to swallow it back down. Tears spring to my eyes and my legs feel shaky, but I ignore all of that. I ignore the ringing sound in my ears and the feeling of utter betrayal, and I just focus on the document in front of me.

It’s a marriage certificate and it has Liam’s name on it. Of course, he could be divorced, but that makes no sense, because if he was, then why would he have kept this from me? And why would he have kept the marriage certificate at all? And why aren’t his divorce papers here too?

It all makes a sick kind of sense now. The constant phone calls and summons to go here, there, and everywhere. Until we got serious, I hadn’t realized how often he got called away and I had never really thought about the late nights, sometimes it even got so late that he would text me and say he was staying at one of the hotel rooms that night. And those were just on the nights I was staying at his place, or he was staying at my place. All those other nights, he was free to be anywhere, and I wouldn’t know it.

I remember a couple of weeks ago after another phone call to go into work, I had made a joke about him having an affair and he joked that his side chick was a hotel. But he wasn’t having an affair at all. Well, he was, but with me. I am the side chick, and the hotel is code for his fucking wife. He could laugh it off because I’m not the one he’s cheating on in his mind.

How could I be this fucking stupid? How could I believe for even a second that someone as smart, successful, and hot as Liam could be single? Or that he could want me and all my emotional baggage. It’s fine for a side chick, but not for the main attraction.

I know I should stay and confront Liam, but I don’t think I can face seeing him right now. And really, what’s the point of me confronting him? He will either confirm it and I don’t really need to hear him say it after I have seen the evidence with my own eyes, or he will deny it and I won’t believe him because I have seen the proof, so either way, we’re done here. If I stay to confront him, it will only be to let him know I know, and I can do that without staying here and being made even more of a fool of.

I slip the marriage certificate out of the file, put the file back away, and shut the drawer. I put the marriage certificate on the desk. I want Liam to know that I know so that when I ghost him completely and refuse to talk to him, he knows it’s because I have found out about his dirty little secret, not because I have freaked out and gone back to my old ways.

I need a way to make sure he notices it though because at a quick glance from the doorway, he probably won’t be able to tell the difference between that and any other bit of paper that needs sorting. I look around and grab the paperweight from the corner of his desk, who the fuck even has a paperweight anymore? I put it on the marriage certificate. He can’t fail to notice that’s been moved and I’m sure he’ll be curious as to why and come closer to see what’s beneath it.

I walk out of the home office, shut the door, and then I go back to the living room. I slip my shoes on, get my purse, then I walk out of Lian’s apartment, and out of his life for good.