TEA FOR THE MISTRESS

Chapter 2: Almost caught

Rebecca’s POV.

It was already noon by the time Kofi, the new driver, pulled into the city traffic, and I sat in the back seat with the food basket on my lap, staring at nothing in particular.

My mind kept drifting back. Last night. To that call. To the way Edmund’s face did that quick, unguarded flash of something real when he saw me standing in the doorway. And then this morning. No breakfast. No kisses. No hand on my waist before he walked out the door.

Edmund always kissed me before he left for work.

Every single morning for five years without exception, until three months now. It was one of those small automatic things that had woven itself so completely into the fabric of our daily life that I had stopped consciously appreciating it the way you stop noticing the weight of something you carry every day until the day it isn’t there and the absence is so loud it embarrasses you.

Now it was missing. And I could not stop noticing.

I had spent the entire morning telling myself to let it go. To stop reading meaning into a missed breakfast and a distracted goodbye. Marriages went through seasons. Edmund had pressures I didn’t always see. I had been telling myself all of this for three months now. Give or take.

Three months of telling myself it was just a season.

Three months of mornings that felt slightly off and evenings that felt slightly empty and a husband who was present in the technical sense physically in the house, occasionally in the same room without being present in any of the ways that actually mattered.

“Kofi,” I said, shifting the basket on my lap. “Be fast. Edmund doesn’t know I’m coming. I don’t want him stepping out for lunch before I get there.”

“Yes ma. Fifteen minutes.”

I looked down at the basket. Rice noodles his favorite. The dish he always asked for when he came home tired and needed something warm and familiar. I had asked the chef to prepare it properly, with the specific balance of ingredients he had never had to ask for twice because I had simply remembered.

That was the thing about loving someone attentively. You build a quiet library of their preferences and their habits and their particular ways of needing to be taken care of. You tend it carefully. For a long time it feels like intimacy. It feels like being known in return.

I was beginning to understand that the library can exist entirely on one side.

We arrived and I stepped out with the basket over my arm. The building rose in front of me glass and steel, sleek and controlled, carrying Edmund’s particular quality. Money that settles and certainly never needs to raise its voice.

The receptionist on Edmund’s floor looked up and blinked with visible surprise.

“Mrs. Jones,” she said, already reaching for the phone.

“Don’t,” I said, softening it with a smile. “Don’t call ahead. I want to surprise him.”

She hesitated for just a fraction of a second. Then she relaxed. “Of course ma. He doesn’t have anything scheduled. You can go right in.”

“Thank you.”

I walked toward his office door with my steps unhurried. I was calm. I was composed. I was a wife bringing her husband lunch on an ordinary Wednesday and there was nothing unusual about that.

And then I heard it.

A laugh. Light, feminine, calibrated in the specific way of a laugh that knows it is being heard. The kind that lands a certain way in a certain kind of room. Coming from just behind the closed door.

I stopped walking.

My hand was already raised, two steps from the door, and I simply stopped. I stood there in the corridor with the basket on my arm and the laugh still hanging in the air around me, already dissolving but not quickly enough.

“I’ll head back to my office now,” a woman’s voice said. Warm. Familiar. Just a degree too comfortable the comfort of someone who has stopped being careful about how she sounds in this particular space.

Something tightened in my chest.

I pushed the door open.

She was already turning to leave and we nearly walked directly into each other. She pulled up short. I pulled up short. For one suspended moment we simply looked at each other.

The first thing I registered was how deliberately put-together she was. Dark hair in careful curls. A fitted dress in a shade that knew exactly what it was doing. Red lipstick so precisely applied it looked less like makeup and more like a statement the kind you make when you have thought carefully about the impression you intend to leave in every room you enter. Beautiful in a way that was clearly intentional. Assembled rather than accidental.

She looked at me and smiled.

“Good morning ma.”

The smile was perfect. Practiced and warm and completely impenetrable. Her eyes stayed level and assessing while her mouth arranged itself into welcome.

“Good morning,” I said, holding her gaze one beat longer than was casual. “I don’t think we’ve…”

“Babe.”

Edmund’s voice cut across mine smooth and quick, already moving toward me, positioning himself between us in that subtle way people do when they are managing something they didn’t expect to manage.

“This is Rose Benson,” he said pleasantly. “My PA. She joined us about three months ago.”

Three months.

I kept my expression completely still. Tilted my head with warm, pleasant surprise and did not let a single thing I was actually thinking reach my eyes.

Three months ago the Sunday breakfasts stopped. Three months ago the noon calls disappeared. Three months ago Edmund replaced Taylor, his driver without explanation. Three months ago my husband began the slow quiet process of becoming a stranger who slept on the other side of my bed.

“Oh lovely,” I said. “Welcome, Rose.”

“Thank you ma.” Her eyes moved to Edmund just briefly, just a fraction of a second and then back to me. “Sir, I’ll bring those files whenever you’re ready.”

“Thanks, Rose.”

She left. The door clicked shut.

Edmund’s manner shifted immediately that careful warmth of moments ago quietly replaced by something flatter. He looked at me the way you look at something unexpected you are deciding how to handle.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he said. “What if I wasn’t in?”

“Then I would have waited,” I said simply.

I set the basket on his desk. Smoothed my dress. Let the silence sit before I continued.

“You didn’t eat breakfast. So I brought lunch. Before you ended up eating something terrible somewhere.”

He glanced at the basket. Something moved across his face, guilt or irritation or both, dressed as neither.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. I wanted to.”

He picked it up not to open it, not to look inside with any real interest and set it to the side of his desk. Then he reached for a file. Flipped it open. His eyes moved to the page.

Like I was already on my way out. Like I hadn’t just driven across the city because I still, despite everything, cared enough to remember exactly how he liked his food.

I watched him for a moment. Then I picked up my handbag.

“I’ll let you get back to work,” I said.

“Mm.”

Not a thank you. Nor I’ll call you later. Just that single dismissive syllable dropped into the air without even the courtesy of eye contact.

I walked to the door. My face was smooth all the way to the elevator. All the way through the lobby. All the way into the back seat of the car.

It was only when the door closed and the city began moving past the window that I allowed myself to sit with what was sitting in my chest. That low, quiet, unsettling certainty that had been making itself at home since 2:30 last night and had just in the space of a single doorway collision and a three-second glance became significantly harder to talk myself out of.

I hadn’t found proof. I hadn’t found anything I could hold up and point to and say this. This is what I know.

But I had found Rose Benson. Standing in my husband’s office with a laugh she wasn’t bothering to keep quiet and a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and three months of timeline sitting between all of it like a thread I had only just noticed I was already holding.

“Take me home, Kofi.”

“Yes ma.”

I turned back to the window. I thought about the basket of rice noodles sitting to the side of Edmund’s desk. Prepared the way he liked it. Delivered by a woman who still remembered how.

Set aside without being opened.

I thought about that the whole way home