PART 12 – The Director of My Life
The images kept playing on my phone screen as if I were watching a horror film in which I myself played the tragic protagonist. Every detail of that supposed "secret" affair, every night I thought I had spent secretly and unobserved, had been orchestrated from start to finish.
That other woman—my mistress from 2015—had never just been a casual encounter in a bar on the outskirts of town. Now that I saw the images strung together like this, the puzzle pieces fell into place with terrifying precision. The office where she worked, the conference where we supposedly ran into each other, the hotel booking itself... everything traced back to lines running through third parties. Third parties paid or directed by my own wife.
I lowered my phone and stared at the rippling water of the canal. My whole life had been a play. For twenty-five years I had thought I had the freedom to make choices, to make mistakes, to secretly color outside the lines. But in reality, I had always moved within the frameworks she had drawn out for me.
At that moment, I heard footsteps behind me on the gravel of the canal path. Soft, controlled footsteps I would recognize out of thousands, even if I had lived on a deserted island for years.
I turned around.
There she stood. She wore the same elegant coat as yesterday, her hair was styled in a perfect fold, and in her hand she held a paper cup of coffee, as if she were simply taking a quiet morning stroll through the city.
"You look pale," she said calmly, stopping two meters away from the bench. "Did you have a good night at the motel?"
I couldn't utter a thing. My throat was bone dry. I held up the plastic bag containing the old watch with trembling hands. "Why?" was the only word I could still get out. "Why on earth did you do this to me? All these years... why did you stay with me?"
She sighed deeply, took a calm sip of her coffee, and looked at me with a look of utter indifference combined with an ice-cold superiority.
"Because revenge at the moment it happens is too easy," she replied calmly. "If I had left you in 2015, you might have learned from it, or you would have remarried someone else and happily gone on with your life. But by letting you believe you were sly, by letting you believe all those years that you were keeping secrets from me, I let you build your own prison."
She took one more step closer.
"And today, on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, I turned the key."
