Successful wife

You wake up to the sound of the front door and not to the alarm. It is 6:40. Her side of the bed is already cold, the duvet folded back flat and neat, and there is a mug in the sink with a ring of coffee dried in the bottom of it. On the counter, a note: "early meeting, sorry, back by six. love you."

You have a long time to think about it.

One month. That is how long this has been going on, and you only really start counting now, sitting on the edge of the bed with the note in your hand. One month ago she was an assistant copying, filing, taking the minutes nobody wanted. Then team lead. Then, ten days after that, acting supervisor, with her own desk and her own little brass nameplate and a raise that turned up in the joint account before she mentioned it.

Three times. In thirty-one days. In a company where Ito from accounts waited four years for one step and then left.

And she is good at it now. That is the part you keep circling. She is good at it. She comes home with her chin up and talks about throughput and the Q3 numbers and says "the director likes the way I run the floor," and she says it easily, and she never once says it looking at you.

The afternoon goes by in pieces. You do the bins. You do not do the ironing. At ten past six the key turns.

She comes in with her jacket over her arm and her hair coming down out of its pin and her tights wrinkled at the ankle, and she is smiling before she is through the door, and she is talking before she has put her bag down.

"God, sorry, they kept me hi. Hi. Have you eaten? There's " she waves vaguely at the kitchen, at nothing, " there's stuff. Let me just get in the shower, I'm disgusting."

And then she is past you, and the bathroom door shuts, and it doesn't. It rests on the latch and swings back a centimetre, and then another, leaving a long thin gap of light and steam and tile.

The perfume comes out through the gap before the steam does. Not hers. Something with a lot of pepper in it and something underneath like leather, and it is not the stuff in the bottle on her dresser. You can hear her heels come off, one, two. The zip of the skirt. The shower starts and immediately runs cold for a second, the pipes knocking.

You look through.

You can see her from hip to shoulder. Her back, the line of it, her hair pinned up and the little wisps at her nape stuck down with sweat. The skirt on the floor. The knickers on the floor next to it. She steps out of them, into the water, and her whole body drops an inch in relief, and then she does something you have never seen her do in five years.

She stands with her feet apart and reaches down between her legs with two fingers and hooks something out of herself, and drops it in her palm. Then she reaches behind her, further, and her back arches and her mouth comes open, and she works something else out of her arse with a wince and adds it to the same palm. Then she straightens up and stands there looking at her own hand for a second, breathing, water going over her tits and off the ends of them.

You can nearly see. It is small and pale and latex and it has a knot in it, and there are two of them.

She tips them into the toilet and puts the lid down and pulls the handle, and the cistern fills, and she just stands in the water with her hand on the tiles.

And then, without turning round, she says: "...you're there, aren't you."

She pushes the door open a hand's width with her foot, and looks at you through the steam, and her face is already going red from the neck up.

"What are you doing?"

The camera is the size of a thumbnail and it costs more than you'd admit to spending. You sew it into the lining of the side pocket of her bag on Sunday night while she is asleep, and you set it to record on motion, and you tell yourself you will not look until there is something to look at.

Three days. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. She leaves at six-forty each morning and the bag goes with her, and each evening she comes home smelling of pepper and leather and someone else's cigarettes, and each evening the bathroom door rests on the latch and the cistern fills.

On Wednesday she is so tired she is asleep by ten. You lie next to her for two hours listening to her breathe and then you get up and take the bag into the kitchen and cut the lining open with nail scissors and shake the card out into your palm.

The file is nineteen minutes and four seconds long.

It is the conference room on the fourth floor at seven in the evening. The blinds are half down and the overheads are off and there is one desk lamp, and it throws everything yellow and long. Papers are still on the table. A water glass is on its side and nobody has picked it up.

She is on top of the table, on all fours, still in her blouse and her heels, and her skirt is bunched up around her waist and there is nothing under it. Her tits hang in the light and swing with every shove. Kuroda is behind her with his shirt open and his belt hanging loose and both hands buried in the meat of her hips, pulling her back onto him, and she is doing that thing now where she arches her back right down and puts her face against the table and just takes it.

And Aoki is standing at the head of the table with his flies open and one hand in her hair, and she is working his cock with her mouth in time with what Kuroda is doing to her, and when she loses the rhythm Aoki says something short and pulls her hair and she moans around it and finds it again.

Nineteen minutes. She comes twice. The second time she has to put her forehead down on the table and Aoki holds her there by the hair and says something to the camera and laughs.

At eleven minutes Kuroda pulls out and she turns over and they swap. Nobody speaks. There is no tenderness in it at all. It is a shift being worked.

The last four seconds are her, kneeling on the table, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist, breathing hard, hair stuck to her face and looking straight into the phone propped against the water jug, which is where the light is coming from, and saying: "Are we done? I've got a train."

In the bedroom, through the wall, she turns over in her sleep and mumbles something.

You have the card in your hand and it is warm from the laptop. Nineteen minutes. You have proof enough to end a marriage before breakfast.

Do you go and wake her up with it or do you put the card back in the lining and say nothing?