PART 6 – The Parking Lot in the Night
The cold night air hit my face as if I had taken a bucket of ice water over my head when I left the restaurant. Behind me, the two women—my past and my secret offspring—remained at the corner table with the untouched pasta. I hadn't paid a cent, but the bill awaiting me was many times higher than those fifty dollars for the steak.
In the parking lot, our gray sedan waited with the engine running. The headlights shone weakly through the drizzle that had started to fall. I walked with leaden shoes toward the passenger side, but when I pulled the door handle, it turned out to be locked. With a light click, the driver's side lock opened. My wife, who had in the meantime seated herself in the passenger seat or was driving from there, gestured for me to take the driver's seat.
I opened the door and got in. The scent of her expensive perfume, the same scent that had surrounded me for a quarter of a century, hung in the confined space. It felt suffocating.
"Start the engine," she said without looking at me. She stared at the dashboard where drops of drizzle slid across the windshield.
"Where are we going?" I asked, my hands trembling on the steering wheel. "What on earth is going on here? Who were those women in there? Did you really know... from the very beginning?"
My wife slowly turned her head toward me. In the weak glow of the streetlights, I saw her face tight and inscrutable. There was no anger to be seen, no tears, no reproach. Only a terrifying, clinical calm.
"Start the engine," she repeated with a voice that brooked no contradiction. "Or do you want me to tell our son right now what happened to your bank accounts today?"
The name of our son—our only, beloved son who was now studying in another city and thought his parents formed the happiest couple in the world—struck me like a sledgehammer.
"Leave our son out of this!" I shouted. "This is between you and me!"
"This hasn't been just between you and me for a long time," she replied bitterly. "You thought you had created a secret in 2015. But you laid the foundations yourself for the wrecking ball that is overturning our entire life today. Drive to the old estate by the river now. There is enough privacy there to calmly balance the books."
I wanted to protest, I wanted to scream that this was madness, but when I dared to look into her eyes, I knew resistance was futile. She held all the cards. With a shuddering sigh, I turned the key and put the car into gear, driving out into the night, away from the restaurant where our anniversary lay in ruins.
