The Love Affair(Good Wife Better Mistress)

Special Moments

"It looks like my husband can do whatever he wants," Nicole says to herself with a sneer.

When Nicole received the friend request she was confused by the profile picture. Instead of Alex or the company, the picture shows a distant girlish figure in pink. The girl stands under a big, weeping cherry tree and the wind swirls her skirt like the pink petals in the air. Nicole was surprised that this feminine profile picture belongs to her overbearing husband.

Nicole studies the picture more closely and she can't shake the feeling that both the figure and the scene are familiar. She squints at the photo, but she can't make out any helpful details. Based on the size of the girl and the dress she wears, Nicole guesses that she's about ten years old.

"Why does it feel familiar?" she thinks, "The girl is Her?"

As she stands at the door of the kitchen staring at her phone, the maid doesn't know whether she should pass Nicole or wait for her. In a low voice she interrupts Nicole's reflection, "Mrs. Romano, I will go ahead and request that the cooks prepare the kitchen for you."

Nicole absently nodded her agreement without removing her eyes from the screen of her phone.

"Who is it?" she wonders.

Thinking too much about things she can't remember makes her head in pain. She rubbed her temples and decides to delete Alex from her friend list. To her surprise, she's unable to remove him. She taps the screen over and over, but nothing happens.

"Is there something wrong with the app?" she wonders, "Or has Alex somehow meddled with my account?"

The more she thinks about it, the more certain she becomes that Alex has hacked her account. He's forced her to accept his friend request and now found a way to prevent her from deleting him.

"What an asshole!" she says aloud.

Nicole idly leans against the doorframe and her long, slightly tangled hair falls her back. Unconsciously, she bites her lower lip with fury and faint teeth marks appear on her rosy lips.

She looks at the profile and finds nothing to reveal the girl in the photo's identity. Thinking about the mystery photo reminds her of her profile, and she quickly navigates to her profile page. There are dozens of candid photos of Alex. In these photos, Alex is eating, frowning, staring, and sleeping.

Nicole remembers that she was obsessed with her husband in the early days of their marriage. She often took secret photos of him to look at by herself; she even snuck into his bedroom while he was sleeping to take the illicit photos. She scrolls through the pictures one by one and feels the shame rising in her throat.

"So this is how I saw him back then," she thinks.

The photos capture the moments in which she found him most handsome or charming, but when she looks at them now she can't see beyond his pride and arrogance. She deletes them one by one.

She doesn't want Him to see how obsessed she was, and she's scared of his rage if he sees the photos. She took all of the photos secretly as he hates being photographed, and she posted them without his knowledge or permission. She recalls that a journalist once took photos of him secretly and was beaten mercilessly by a group of Alex's security guards.

At the Romano Group, Alex leans back in his black leather chair. He holds his cellphone in his hand and watches as every photo of him disappears from Nicole's profile.

He had never thought to look at Nicole's profile before and seeing so many photos of himself filled him with a strange and insuppressible happiness. Though her previous infatuation used to annoy him, he's recently realized that he cares what she thinks about him. The candid photos on her profile reassured him that in spite of her recent ferociousness, she still has a soft spot for him. Then the photos disappear.