The Forgiveable Journey Of The Cheated

11. A Week-Long Journey of Enlightenment

SUNDAY

The anonymous tattletale sent these words late Sunday night while Dan and Eve were sleeping. When they arise the next morning, after sitting down to eat Corn Flakes, they reach for their tablets to check their messages and read the news headlines. At the sight of Mike Smith’s message, Eve remains motionless and pales. Her reaction is an intimate but not entirely hidden thing. Dan asks her “what is it?” In response, she turns her tablet around so he can read the text and leaves the room as her nausea intensifies.

She later studies the message to discern more information. Perhaps there is an indication about who sent the message, but to her disappointment, there is nothing more.

Dan and Eve both wonder “Who could have written this? Why would someone do such a thing?”

After the initial shock comes the not very well thought out conclusion on Dan’s behalf that Mike Smith is a friend of Eve’s, because no one he knows knows. No one at his workplace knows and Charlotte is the epitome of discretion. It doesn’t really make sense what he is saying considering that all of Eve’s friends already know Eve knows, but obviously his brain isn’t working properly. His message evolves into his way of saying to Eve, “I wish you hadn’t told everybody!” She pleads that her sanity would have jumped ship if she had not spoken copiously to her friends about pretty much everything.

Screw sanity, she is still going crazy!

Eve suggests that Mike Smith has to be someone from his job, but Dan is still convinced that it was a quarantined secret between him and Charlotte with no possible leaks. Eve emits the hypothesis that it is Charlotte, or a friend of Charlotte’s. Dan responds by saying “Charlotte already knows you know.” Eve argues that Charlotte could not know that Eve knows for sure and points out that Charlotte was the one who threatened to tell Eve when Dan broke up with her, thus provoking his confession in the first place three months ago. Obviously Charlotte wants to make sure Eve knows. Dan says “she knows you already know because I told her that I told you”.

Despite the negative charge in the room, Eve has to laugh. “Well you’re not exactly Mister honest and follow-through”, the latter statement referring to 3 years to previous commitments made to Charlotte that he would leave Eve to be with her (a tasty morsel of information procured through Eve’s irritating and persistent questioning).

This conversation creates considerable tension within the room. It also cumulates to the point when, as predicted, the additional information she so hoped would be derived from this event begins to trickle in. Although Dan insists that it is not Charlotte, Eve points out that Charlotte is not happy about being left high and dry after 3 years of sex and may want to cause trouble for him. “I find it hard to believe that you could just break up with a person like her and that would be the end of things…” Dan explains that Charlotte tried to convince him to change his mind, but after he put his foot down, she wrote that he would regret his choice. This was not the first time Charlotte had said it. Charlotte suspects that he will crawl back to her eventually, as he had in the past. When he made it clear that there was no return and that Eve knew everything, Charlotte still felt compelled to come over to their house and tell her version of the story. “I said ‘fine, but afterward, we’ll go see Liam and tell him.’ Only then did she back off”.

“She has nothing to gain in telling you” states Dan, thus ending the conversation.

Mike Smith is not very welcome to her tablet in Dan’s eyes, but Eve now feels a little exhilarated. She has new information: Dan had tried unsuccessfully to end his relationship with Charlotte more than once, the break-up had involved mutual threatening, Liam is not aware of the affair, Charlotte fears Liam finding out, and there are two versions of the Charlotte and Dan love story.