What Lies Beneath

Shaking her head, she locked the door and went back to her room to get dressed for the day. She wasn’t exactly sure why—she had no intention of leaving—but it seemed like the thing to do. Reaching into the back of the closet, she pulled out a pair of khaki pants and a long-sleeved blouse in a dusty shade of pink and then slipped them both on with a pair of loafers.

Returning to the kitchen, she boiled water for tea and slathered another piece of toast with raspberry jam she found in the refrigerator. When the tea was ready, she poured a cup, grabbed her toast and went to explore the room Will had said was her private office.

She’d glanced at it briefly the day before but hadn’t ventured inside. After their talk—and Nigel’s call—she was afraid of what she’d find. Today, she wanted to tackle her past head-on and set it aside for good. She settled at the glass-and-chrome desk and ate while taking it all in. A large space on the desk was cleared off for her laptop, which had been destroyed in the crash. Stacked around it were glossy magazines and file folders. It was all very neat and precise. It made her want to reach out and shuffle some of the pages around. There was simply too much perfection.

Across from her desk were a red leather love seat and a chrome-and-glass coffee table. Several large advertising posters and a few framed magazine ads were hung on the wall for products she recognized. Her best guess was that these were campaigns she designed. Her family told her she was a successful partner in a Madison Avenue advertising agency.

Looking at them, a feeling of unease washed over her. Not only were they completely unfamiliar, but she had no thoughts about the marketing strategies that went into them. All she could come up with was that she liked the dress one of the models was wearing. That was it.

Without her memory, she was going to need a career backup plan, and fast. Especially if Will opted to leave as planned. He’d left the door open for a relationship, putting the ball in her court to decide what she wanted. If she’d really hurt him as badly as he’d said, he was right to leave and she wouldn’t blame him. But last night’s discussion with Nigel had shown her that she did want to try for more with Will. She wanted him to stay, and not just for the financial support.

And yet, knowing he always had one foot out the door made her hesitant to invest too much. She might be the one to get hurt this time. It was a sobering thought that sent her scrambling for a chore to occupy her mind.

Cynthia opted to start shuffling through paperwork, partially out of curiosity and partially out of the hope that it might jog something in her head. She opened files and thumbed through pages about different campaigns and clients. Mostly it was unfamiliar gobbledy-gook. The advertising lingo was completely lost on her.

Setting them aside, she opened a drawer in her desk and fished around. At the front of the drawer were neatly stacked and aligned office supplies. Further back was a pile of envelopes. Cynthia pulled them out and eyed the outside. They were all addressed to her. Some of the postmarks went back as much as a year.

Picking the oldest one, she removed the letter and started reading it. It was a love letter from Nigel. An actual, handwritten love letter. It was sort of an odd thing to do in this day and age, but he explained in the first one how he thought it was the only sincere way to express how he felt. Email was cold and impersonal. She’d probably kept the incriminating letters for their sentimental value.

With a sigh, Cynthia sat back into her chair. She knew she’d had an affair, but being confronted with evidence of it was disconcerting. It was quite the romance they’d shared. He was a struggling artist she met at a gallery show. Since that time, they’d been meeting secretly at lunch, going away for weekends together under the guise of business trips and taking advantage of Will’s long hours by flaunting their relationship in the apartment she shared with him.

The letters were more romantic than she’d expected from a fling. She couldn’t know what she wrote back to him, but they seemed to be in love. It boggled her mind, not jiving with what everyone told her about herself. How did an uptown society girl fall in love with a poor artist from the Bronx? She didn’t understand. Was she just using Nigel, or was she too embarrassed to be with him publicly? Daddy and Mother certainly wouldn’t approve. Did loving Nigel and marrying Will somehow give her the best of both worlds?

Cynthia felt sick and was thankful to only have toast in her stomach. She thought she wanted to regain insight into her old life, but now she never wanted to remember the truth. She wanted to erase it all.

Piling the letters into a heap on her desk, she dug around for anything else incriminating. Her laptop and cell phone were gone, so any digital evidence of her relationship with Nigel went down with the plane. If and when she got a new computer, she’d purge anything left behind in her accounts. Will had already mentioned replacing her cell phone. She’d make sure to ask for a new number that Nigel couldn’t get his hands on. In her office file cabinet, she found a folder with various cards from Valentine’s Day and her birthday inside. None were from Will. Those were added to the pile, as were some photos of Cynthia and a blond man she didn’t recognize. They looked far too cozy and the location far too tropical. She could take no chances with this. It all had to go.