The Carpenters Dilemma

©️ Andyhm. 2025

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This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons. All characters engaging in sexual relationships or activities are 18 years old or older.

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Almost eight years ago, I dipped my toes into the LW pond for the first time and posted The Woodworker's Wife. Over the years, it's garnered a love-hate relationship with readers. It was those comments that helped me improve later stories. Since then, I keep spotting errors and plot holes in the original I'd missed or ignored, and I couldn't help feeling it would benefit from a rewrite. Whenever I hit the dreaded writer's block on another story, I'd come and spend a few minutes attempting to improve an old friend. This is what I believe that story should have been. It's a complete rewrite, hence the new title, but it follows the same core premise. Only I couldn't help feeling the original was posted in the wrong category, I've always thought the story was a Romance, hence why this version will be posted there. It is longer, by almost 8K words (the best part of three lit pages).. Hopefully, you will enjoy reading this new version as much as I did writing it.

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The Carpenter's Dilemma.

Prologue:

Wood: A simple four-letter word for such a complex gift given to us by Mother Earth. I've been enamoured with it for as long as I can remember. Wood is warm to the touch, and no two pieces are alike. The aroma of freshly sawn timber is so sensual and evocative; it's up there with the best fragrances. It can be textured or smooth and exists in a symphony of hues.

My grandfather began my love affair with this beautiful material. He had the same passion, working as an ecclesiastical carpenter, repairing and replacing the decorative wooden furniture and fittings of churches. He gave me my first carving when I was four; to most others, it was a naïvely carved wooden horse toy. But even at that young age, I could see how he'd teased the horse's soul from the core of that scrap of oak. I have it; still, it sits on my desk, a rough, stylised, quickly carved horse he created in a few minutes, now stained and worn smooth from my hands.

By the time I was a teenager, I'd absorbed all that he could teach me, and when squeezed dry, he introduced me to other masters in the art of manipulating wood. I sat at their feet and learnt my trade.

Wood is my passion, yet it pales significantly compared to my feelings for my wife and daughter. Only there comes a time in a relationship when enough is enough, and I have finally reached that point.

What could I be thinking about? Well, it's straightforward, well, simple to me. After ten years of what I thought was a happy marriage, life had just dropped the proverbial bombshell. My wife is on the cusp of an affair with another man

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1.

I'm David Peters, Dave to my friends, and I've been married to Zoe for the past ten years. We live in a converted barn in South England with our young daughter and her pets. The barn sits nestled in the shadow of the South Downs, surrounded by farmland and close to an archetypical Sussex village.

Zoe and I met twelve years earlier while studying at the Brighton Art College. I was there adding an academic stamp to the woodworking skills I'd acquired as a teenager. A formal qualification was the compromise I'd made with my parents; they gave me both the moral and financial support enabling me to follow my chosen career, and after a pleasant three years, I left with a degree in interior design with an emphasis on furniture.

Zoe was an artist studying art techniques under the tutelage of a renowned artist, and she was the star of her class. Since graduating, she has steadily gained a deserved reputation as one of the South of England's foremost female portrait artists. Several years ago, she was the featured artist at the influential artists' exhibition in a small but highly regarded gallery in Brighton. Her pieces were primarily portraits, nudes and semi-nude studies. The local and national press reviews were positive, with several art critics labelling her as an artist to watch. She was able to sell the majority of the exhibited paintings. Since then, several other galleries nationwide have expressed an interest in displaying her work. While at home, she's been offered more and more commissions.

Like every besotted husband, my wife is the most beautiful woman I know. She's a year younger than me, with long light brown hair that always seemed permanently flecked with paint. Hair that frames an oval but not a classically beautiful face, with blue eyes and a cute little button nose. She's five foot six and has a ballerina's willowy stature; I'm madly in love with her, and she's given me the impression that the feeling is mutual. She has a happy and friendly nature; if she has one fault, she's too trusting of people. She tends to see the best in them--more than once, I've had to extricate her from situations that had gotten away from her. At a party, a friend described us as the perfect couple. I suppose, in a way, she's right; I'd always considered we were perfect for each other, warts and all!

I'm thirty-two, with no standout features. I'm average height, five foot eleven. I'm reasonably fit, and my arms and shoulders are well developed, a benefit of the physical nature of my work. I've dark brown hair and steel blue eyes set in an angular face.

I've turned my skill working with wood into a bespoke furniture business, making commissioned pieces from native timber and ethically sourced exotic woods. As my order book confirms, I have a healthy two-year backlog of orders. In a good year, I can produce upwards of twenty pieces, finished to a standard I feel comfortable with. Fortunately, I could demand a premium price, although it wasn't always like that. If you are rude enough to want to know how much I make a year. Well, it varies; pieces can sell for as much as £25,000, depending on the size, the material, and the complexity. You do the maths.

Selling the furniture paid the bills, but my passion was releasing the hidden soul from within the core of the unique pieces of wood I stumbled across. In my mind, creatures and figures were concealed within the grain and fibres, waiting for me to nurture them into existence.

When I was younger, my grandfather gave me an exquisite wooden box carved by an artist called John Fox; it's small and fits in the palm of your hand. It depicts a stylised cat sleeping on a pillow. It's a beautiful, simple piece that's also a functional trinket box, the curled-up cat, the lid. Recently, I came across an article written by one of his students, in which he described how John had explained that the chosen piece of timber would speak to him, telling him what is hidden in its depths, waiting to be revealed. Now and again, I have the same feeling when I handle a piece of wood.

Since I began, I've released several objects hidden inside the timber. Creating pieces that hopefully would give others as much pleasure and satisfaction as the cat box still gives me. They aren't something I'd ever consider selling commercially; they sit on a shelf in the office, patiently waiting until the right person spots them. There was another set of figures that I'd released over the years, but those were personal to me, and I would never part with them.

On one occasion, we enjoyed a drink at our local pub; tucked in my pocket was a tiny carved hedgehog I'd finished months earlier. I'm unsure why I'd picked it up that evening, but I had. A woman in her late forties walked in with her daughter and sat at a table near us. I'd seen them before and knew they lived in the village. I swear I felt the hedgehog struggle to get out of my pocket. I knew what to do; stepping over to them, I placed the hedgehog in the older woman's hand.

"I believe that this should be yours," I said.

She looked at it for a long time as it sat on her upturned palm. I'm convinced it twitched and then settled down. She looked up and smiled at me with tears in her eyes. "Thank you; today would have been our 25th anniversary, and my husband and I loved watching the hedgehogs that lived in our garden.

Occasionally, I'd come across a piece of wood that, in its depth, hid something incredibly unique and personal to me. What would emerge from the depths I've kept hidden away? The first to appear was an image of a sleeping Zoe; several more came over the years, morphing to include our daughter after she was born. They were an extension of my love. I've never shown them to anyone, not even Zoe. Twelve sat in the back of a locked cupboard in my workshop.

I wasn't the only one in our family passionate about their art. I could stand and watch Zoe work for hours when she loses herself to her art--lost in concentrating on the model and the evolving image slowly appearing on the canvas. I love how she chews on the end of her brush as she concentrates. Her flicking the hair back behind her ear sings to my heart. She became one with her art; the model was positioned, and Zoe would enter a separate plane. More than once, after a long, all-day session, I've had to take the brush from her tightly bent fingers and give the poor model their freedom.

Not that I'm alone in watching the other. I've seen her sneaking glances at me while I was working, smiling as she frantically drew in her ever-present notebook. I found her notebook on her bench one afternoon. It was full of charcoal sketches of me. The one large oil painting of me she's completed hangs in our bedroom. I'm shown bent over my bench, concentrating on the complex joint I'm creating. It's the only authentic signed painting she's finished of me; the others were small informal studies.

She tells me that I'm her most challenging subject. She's never been satisfied that any of her paintings or sketches do me justice. She doesn't feel she can capture the essence of me in paint. She tells me that one is the closest she's ever come to capturing the depth of my emotion for the wood I'm working on.

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We met one sunny afternoon in May of my final year at college. At that time, I was sharing a house on the outskirts of Brighton with a couple of other final-year students and an established artist. That year, the house was included in the Brighton Artist's open house scheme, as Donald, the artist, had gained a reputation as an up-and-coming sculptor.

If you've never heard of the Brighton open house scheme, you have missed a fantastic opportunity to meet artists in their homes and view their work. The scheme runs for a couple of months each year, and local artists turn their homes into temporary art galleries.

Our house was a popular stop on the tour due to Donald's growing reputation. He, in turn, was magnanimous in allowing his housemates to display a few of their pieces alongside his. I took advantage of his generosity and displayed a couple of my carvings and a desk and chair.

The pieces I carve are visual and tactile; they beg you to pick them up and feel their sinuous curves. To a lesser extent, my furniture follows the same rules. I'd placed a piece close to my heart in the desk's middle. I told anyone who showed interest that if they could work out what it represented and, more importantly, what it meant to me, then they were the person who deserved to own it. Before this piece, my carvings were predominantly of animals. This one was different; it had been born from a family tragedy. Since I'd set it reverently in the centre of the table, several people had offered their opinions, but none had been correct. A few visitors realised it was a stylised person, but none recognised or understood the emotion it represented and the reason behind its creation.

I saw a young woman pick up the piece. She held it reverently as she slowly turned it over and over in her hands, and tears formed in the corner of her eyes.

Approaching her, I gestured at the carving and asked, "What do you see?"

She looked up at me from the piece cradled in her hands. "A woman," she said immediately. Then, after looking back down, she added, "A beautiful woman twisted in grief for the loss of a loved one."

She held my gaze. "This is your work." It wasn't a question. And you knew the woman." Again, it wasn't a question.

I nodded, the memory still painful, and tried to explain, "The woman is my cousin; she and her partner had lost their six-month-old daughter in an unexpected cot death."

I had poured all the family's grief into that piece, adding my own. I'd tried giving it to Gina, but she couldn't take it. 'It's too powerful," she told me. 'The emotions are so raw; I'd cry every time I saw it." So it had been sitting on a shelf in my room, waiting for someone who deserved to own it.

And that was our first interaction. I tried to give her the piece, but she refused. She shook her head and said, "It's part of you; you should never give it up." I knew she was right, and the piece had found its owner, only I'd been too close to it to understand I had been its intended owner all along. Many of my future pieces were carved with a specific person in mind, but a fair percentage

As a conciliation, I offered to take her out to dinner. She'd accepted with a gracious smile. Over dinner that evening, we exchanged our life stories, and by the end of the meal, I knew I was in love with the woman sitting opposite me. Our first tentative kiss as I walked her home sent shockwaves coursing through my body. Zoe gasped and pushed herself against me, her lips seeking mine for a second, longer, deeper kiss.

We did something neither of us had done on a first date: She returned to my room, and we made love. We enjoyed many more dates over the next few weeks until Zoe moved in with me for my last few months of college. A year later, just after she graduated, we got married.

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We live in a converted barn in Southeast England, situated on the outskirts of a village in East Sussex, not too far from Brighton. Soon after I graduated, my favourite spinster aunt sold me a property she had inherited for a pittance. That was the perfect price, as I could afford a pittance. The property consisted of a dilapidated farm cottage, a separate barn, and a stable block, all sitting on several acres. I sold the cottage and an acre of land to a developer and used the proceeds to convert the barn into a home.

After we moved into our new home, I drew up plans to convert the long stable block into a workplace. I intended to create a workshop for me at one end and a studio for Zoe at the other. The section in between would become our office and display area.

Working closely with a local builder, it took several months to make the building watertight, then a further six to transform it into a studio for Zoe and a workshop for me; I knew what each of us wanted from our working space. I trusted no one else to add the finishing touches. The building became a temple for our creativity. At the insistence of the insurance company, we installed a security system. We later added security cameras to the outside, office and workshop. Zoe refused to have any in her studio, citing her model's right to privacy, which I would later rue.

The summer after Zoe graduated, we got married. It was a low-key event, just family and close friends. It took us several years to establish our chosen careers, build our confidence, and attract the clientele we needed to survive. During the early days, we'd often anxiously wait for the post to deliver a cheque so we could pay the outstanding bills and buy food for that week. We survived on cycles of feast and famine.

Hopefully, that was past us, as we had both established a reputation in our respective fields, and the bank balance had benefited. No more waiting for a cheque to clear. Life was comfortable, and now we could afford the better things and send Siobhan to the private school in the village.

We immersed ourselves in the village's social life. The restaurant at the local pub was child-friendly, and when the village cricket team was short a player, I'd play the odd match. We'd been invited to join our local golf and sports club. Neither of us was inclined to chase a golf ball around the course, but we enjoyed tennis and badminton. There was a sauna and a decent-sized pool, which Siobhan loved. Outside the club, we enjoyed hiking; the South Downs that overshadowed the village gave us many trails to explore. Zoe was an excellent cook, and in the summer months, alfresco dinner parties in the garden became a staple of our social life.

Like all married couples, we had our little arguments and disagreements. But we never let them fester; we could always discuss our problems. In hindsight, Zoe's reluctance to discuss the situation we were to find ourselves in should have been a strong hint that there was a snake in our garden.

I'm not overtly jealous; I'd always trusted Zoe, but then again, I'll not stand idly by if a man comes on too strongly to Zoe. I had to temper any jealousy, especially around the studio when you consider the constant stream of attractive men and women vying for her attention, many of whom posed naked or semi-nude for their portraits. We had developed a set of professional rules that worked for us. If the sitter wanted a nude picture of themselves, I'd ensure I was within earshot. I'd seen Adonis's sitting for her, that even I could find attractive. She was always calm and collected. She would see me watching, and she would grin and blow me a kiss before returning to her palette of colours.

Early on, that rule only applied to male patrons, but after a couple of female sitters acted up, it was changed to all. Nor would she take a commission that required her to paint away from her studio. The only exception to her chaperone rule was the small group of professional models that Zoe hired for her projects--those we both trusted and, over the years, most had become friends.

Getting back to the current problem, a few weeks previously, she told me about a potential lucrative commission in the offing. A close friend had recommended her to a business college who was looking for someone to paint a portrait of himself. We had been sitting at the kitchen table; Zoe had just dropped our daughter off at the kindergarten and, on the way back, had picked up a batch of freshly baked croissants from our local baker.

As we sat buttering the still-warm croissants, she said, "I had a bit of an odd call yesterday from Linda. It seems she'd shown her new finance director, Marcus Forde, that painting of Paul I did, and he liked it so much he's keen for me to paint something similar for him."

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This needs a bit of back history: Linda was Zoe's flatmate when we met, and we have stayed close friends with her and her husband ever since. She has been, and still is, my source of information on all things Zoe.