I may regret this, but I don’t care. Lana tried one key after the other, crouched low between desk and office chair. No matter which key she tried, however, nothing was making the lock budge.
Not until she reached the second to last key, which snapped everything open.
Lana gasped, mentally preparing herself for whatever she might find. Love letters? Dirty books? Presents exchanged between master and mistress? Whatever was in here, it was not meant for Lana’s eyes… but for some reason Chloe was more than invited to partake.
That alone was enough to give Lana the strength to pry it open.
She looked upon a mess of books and papers. Neatly organized, yes, but a mess nonetheless. Piles of Ken’s stationery, neatly covered in his handwriting, stared back at her. Spiral bound books and what looked like a manuscript proof were crammed into the corner. Everything was covered in colorful sticky notes, some of them with Ken’s handwriting, and others with what looked like… Chloe’s.
What the fuck? Lana pulled out the top stack of papers. They were neatly creased in the middle, the perfect size of Chloe’s bag that she packed around the house when she went about her job. They even smelled like her, if that was possible. Sure enough, Lana found a pink sticky note on top written in girly handwriting. “This is really beautiful!!!”
“I’ll show her a beautiful bruise…” Lana ripped off the note, crumpled it in her hand, and began reading the sordid love letter her husband wrote the maid.
“The first time I met my wife, I thought I was crushed by the weight of the universe and sent to the afterlife. That’s because she looked like a glamorous angel come to deliver either very good or very bad news about my soul’s fate. Instead, she came up to me and asked if I knew where the women’s restroom was. She was one of the only women there, which should have tipped me off regarding how deliriously intelligent and bullheaded she is.”
What the hell?
“Lana Losers was definitely not a loser, no matter how much people made fun of her for her name or for being a woman, let alone a conventionally beautiful one. She was a winner through and through. In that first hour meeting her, I learned that she had dominated her internship at one of the biggest real estate agencies in the city. There were vicious rumors that she slept her way to the position. These are lies, meant to slander my wife. But, even if she had, it didn’t demean her in any way to me. She proved her merit when she showed me her portfolio of one-hundred high class sales… all within the past year!”
Lana flipped through the first half of the papers. Her name showed up at least once on every single one of them.
“What. The. Fuck.”
She reached back in and pulled out more papers. “For our wedding, Lana wanted to have only three bridesmaids, which pleased my mother greatly, since I have exactly three brothers. However, the drama that erupted because I chose two friends over two of my brothers almost caused us to elope in Vegas. I brought it up more than once. It would have been easy enough to do… hop a plane and get married at the nearest Elvis Station. Yet I knew how much a family affair meant to my wife, and convinced her to take on two more bridesmaids. She ended up picking a pair of cousins she hadn’t talked to since she was nineteen. I think they thought they had stepped into Cinderella’s castle on our wedding day. I couldn’t blame them. I thought she looked like a princess as well.”
Lana fell to her knees in front of the open drawer. There were more pages – pages upon pages – with Ken’s meticulous handwriting scribbling his thoughts on his wife, marriage, and even bits and pieces about his career and home life. “The first thing she told me when I asked her to be my girlfriend was that she didn’t want to have children. Was I okay with that? Would I pressure her in ten years to give me an heir? You have to understand, if you’re not in our society, it can be confusing… but women don’t have a lot of freedom regarding children. It’s mandatory in many of the more conservative families to have an heir, preferably a boy or two. You know the saying – an heir and a spare. Lana was upfront saying she was going to get her tubes tied or ablated, or whatever, and never consider motherhood again. It wasn’t for her. Until then, I had been on the fence about children, assuming that my wife would make the final decision. Well, she did, didn’t she? I wouldn’t take a gaggle of perfect children in exchange for my wife.”