Page 46 of Not Yet Yours

He comes over to me and kisses the top of my head and grabs his keys from the coffee table.

“I’ll be as quick as I can, ok?” he says.

“Ok, see you soon,” I say.

He’s almost at the front door when I decide I might as well do some work on my website while he’s gone.

“Liam?” I ask. He turns back. “Can I use your laptop while you’re gone, please?”

“Sure,” he says. “It’s in my home office. It’s charging so if you want to bring it out here, you’ll have to plug it in.”

“Ok, thanks,” I say. “See you soon.”

“Yep, you sure will,” Liam replies and then he’s gone and it’s just me on my own in his apartment once again.

I get up and cross the living room and go down the long corridor there, right to the end, past the bedrooms and everything. I remember asking Liam why his home office was as far away as he could get it from the rest of his living space.

It made sense to me that his bedroom and bathroom might come first, but why the guest rooms and the linen closet too? He explained that he works a lot of hours and in the times when he isn’t working, he doesn’t want to have to pass his home office on his way from one room to another. When he’s done with work, he wants to be able to shut that door and just pretend like the home office doesn’t exist. I guess it makes a certain kind of twisted sense.

I’m smiling to myself at Liam’s logic about the home office as I come to the door. I open it and step inside. I debate unplugging the laptop and taking it through to the living room, but if I do that, I’ll have to sit at the dining table in order for the wire to reach an electrical outlet with the charger, so I decide that I might as well just stay here. Liam’s office chair actually looks comfier than his dining chairs so why the hell not.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Harriet

Igo behind the desk and sit down. I bounce up and down twice on the chair and then adjust it to my height. I was right about it being comfortable, it’s definitely more comfortable than the dining table chairs are. I pull the laptop toward me, fire it up, and open up the browser. I load my website and go into the control panel and then I spend an hour or so playing around with fonts and colors to get the perfect feel. When I’m finally happy with the font and colors chosen, I save my changes and close out of the control panel.

I go to the front end of the website and click around to see what the changes look like, and I smile to myself. It’s really starting to come together now and looking how I want it to. It’s been a definite labor of love, but I’m glad I’ve stuck with it, watched tutorials, and learned how to change things myself rather than hiring someone to do it for me. I did debate doing that, but then I would always be stuck paying someone every time I wanted to make even the simplest of changes because I wouldn’t know what to do and I would be scared to mess around with coding someone else had put in place.

I load my email next and answer a few queries. One is looking particularly promising, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to get an order for another bespoke piece from it. There are also a couple of emails thanking me for orders received and I get a glow inside from their lovely words. There are a ton of spam emails for things I didn’t subscribe to, and I delete all of those without even bothering to open them.

I shoot off replies to those emails that need them and then the others, I either delete or file away. I smile, pleased with myself when my inbox reaches zero. It is so rare for me these days that I take a moment to sit and look at my empty inbox. I love it when I get my inbox sorted like this, it makes me feel like I’m efficient and organized.

This is the point where I would load Facebook or something at home and waste a bit of time scrolling about on social media, but I decide that if I’m going to do that, I might as well use my cell phone and go back to the comfortable couch in the living room where I can stick a film or something on the TV for a bit of background noise too.

I close down the laptop. I’m just about to leave the office when I notice the pile of papers in a basket marked ‘to be filed’. I decide to be nice and help Liam out by filing them for him. I’m sure his system isn’t that complicated and anything I can’t work out where to put it, I’ll leave it. It will still save him a bit of time if I get through most of the sheets. And if I put something in the wrong place, he only has to ask me where it is. I feel like this isn’t the really important stuff anyway because that will surely be in Liam’s office in the hotel where it’s easily accessible to anyone who needs it. This is most likely the bits and pieces that a person needs to keep but doesn’t need to refer back to that often.

I pick up the top sheet of paper from the basket and see that it’s an invoice marked paid which makes me think it’s likely to go in some sort of file labeled finances or tax returns or somethinglike that. I go over to the filing cabinet and look in the top drawer. That drawer seems to cover the first half of the alphabet and I can’t see anything with the word finance, so I try the second drawer. I find a file labeled tax return receipts and I slip the invoice into it. Boom. Just call me secretary.

The next couple are things specific to individual hotels and those are easy enough to file because each hotel has its own file and it’s just a matter of looking under the right letter to find the hotel name in question. I fly through those.

I keep going and it’s not long before I’m left with just one thing to file. It’s some sort of report, a survey on a building by the looks of it. It’s been stamped as rejected so I can only assume it’s a survey on a property that Liam considered buying but then decided against going through with the purchase for whatever reason. I don’t know where Liam would keep that. I’ve looked under M for miscellaneous, R for rejected, O for other, and N for no. I admit N for no was probably a bit of a stretch, but I was getting desperate by that point.

I know I could just do what I had originally planned to do with anything I was unsure of and just leave it in the basket for Liam to deal with, but when I thought of that, I expected to have quite a few bits I didn’t know what to do with and now I only have one, I want to be able to finish the job and it will only frustrate me to have one left over.

I’m not going to let this sheet of paper outwit me. It’s become a game of wits now. Well report, I say game on.

I guess I could file it by the first letter of its name like I have the ones Liam has bought and just leave him a little note explaining to him where he will find it if it’s in the wrong place, but before I commit to doing that, I decide to look in the third and final drawer that I haven’t been in. Maybe that drawer is dedicated to rejected properties and projects. Something tells me that’s going to be the answer because I can’t imagine whyanyone would file the surveys for properties they passed on buying with surveys for the hotels they did buy, and it wouldn’t make sense for Liam to have a whole file dedicated to each property he chose not to invest in.

I bend down and open the drawer and I giggle when I see the name on the one file that is in there; ‘stuff I have been told I need to keep but will probably never look at again’. It definitely sounds like the place for this last piece of filing.

I open the file and flick through it, looking for something similar to the sheet I have in my hand so that I can make sure it is the right place for it before I put it in there. I spot a few other things with rejected stamped on them and that convinces me that it is indeed the right place, and so I put the last bit of the filing into that file. As I close the file, it flops over and shows me the very last piece of paper in it and then the back cover flops down covering it up. I go cold inside when I see that last document in the file. But no. It can’t be what I thought it was. It flicked past so quickly I must have been wrong about what I thought I saw. Yes, that’s it. I was obviously wrong.

I don’t feel any better for telling myself that. I know what I want to do. I want to put the file back away and leave the office and just pretend like I’ve never seen it. But I also know that I won’t be able to do that, because now I have seen something, I have to know if it’s what I think it is or not. Because not knowing for sure will eat away at me and destroy our relationship as sure as me being right about this will. I just need to take a quick look and see that I was totally wrong and then have a laugh at myself for being so silly and dramatic.

I take a deep, steadying breath and I open the file to the back page. I’m prepared for this, I tell myself, but the truth is, I am not ready for this. Not even a little bit, and as soon as I see it again, I feel red-hot bile rising in my throat, but I manage to swallow it back down. Tears spring to my eyes and my legs feel shaky, butI ignore all of that. I ignore the ringing sound in my ears and the feeling of utter betrayal, and I just focus on the document in front of me.

It’s a marriage certificate and it has Liam’s name on it. Of course, he could be divorced, but that makes no sense, because if he was, then why would he have kept this from me? And why would he have kept the marriage certificate at all? And why aren’t his divorce papers here too?

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