Bob Holiday felt conflicting emotions. His best and longest friend Paul Foster had died after a long fight with cancer and he had left a request that Bob would write and read a eulogy at his funeral.
He had met his friend when they both attended their first day in kindergarten and they had remained steadfast friends ever since that day, when they were in their early 40s.
They'd grown up together, attended the same schools and the same local college and they'd even double-dated. They had never fought over the same girl, however. That, although they had never had a formal agreement, was something they just didn't do.
Once they had established their own careers, Bob was a design consultant and Paul a sales executive, they did not see quite so much of each other, but they were still often went out for drinks after work. They were still as tight as ever.
Paul had married Carol and Bob had married Maeve, who, with her long, red hair, attested to her Irish roots.
Carol and Bob had two children, a boy and a girl, and Bob and Maeve had a girl, Tegan.
The families became close, they took trips with each other, they had barbecues and had regular dinner parties together. At least, until Paul and Carol divorced. Then not so much or so often.
It was the evening before Paul's funeral. Bob was sat in his study, thinking about what he could or should put in his eulogy to his best friend.
This was a hard job. A task that required finesse and care. What stories to include? Which to leave out? To mention the divorce or not? Bob knew few of the details of the divorce. Which was strange as he and Paul were normally very close. Still, divorce hits people in different ways.
What to do? What to say? How to encapsulate 40-odd years of a man's life? Not an easy job. Then Bob remembered that Paul had sent him a poem that he had written himself, a couple of years back. Bob had saved the poem on his hard drive, as he had been impressed by the words that had told so much of Paul's life. Odd, in itself, as Paul had shown little interest in writing anything, previously, especially a poem.
For the life of him, Bob could not remember the title. And with thousands of files on the family computer, it would take far too long to track it down.
He realised that if he searched on the name 'Paul' that should narrow it down a little.
The search revealed several documents, including the poem and one that was a huge file that appeared to be a long Internet Message file.
He did not recognise the file, he was intrigued by it. He opened it and within seconds wished he had not. In stark terms even the very first messages showed his wife to be a slut, who had been having sex with Paul for the last three months of his life.
With mounting outrage, Bob read the messages that the two had passed between each other, in which Paul had obviously groomed Maeve to become his slut.
It was horrible for Bob, because as he read through the messages he began to lose first his respect for Maeve, then his love for her. But at the same time his friendship for Paul was rapidly transforming into something that felt like hatred.
The latter shocked Bob, as he could not recall having hated anyone in his life before that time. He had thought he had hated people before, but that was before he had discovered the treachery of Paul and the infidelity of Maeve. His best friend? The love of his wife, the mother of his child? What the fuck?!
Now he truly knew and understood about hatred, what it was, how it was hurting him. How it was hurting him to hate the two people he most loved in the world. And he didn't like that one little bit.
He looked at the screen, saw the words of love, of betrayal, of treachery of scorn and derision and he shouted out: "But none of this is my fucking fault! It's not fair! I loved those two miserable bastards! And this is how they repay me? Bastards!"
He wondered how Maeve would try to deal with it. No matter how she tried, what she said or did, he knew their marriage was over. Burnt to ashes in the white heat of the furnace of her betrayal. The Phoenix was a mythical bird. There would be nothing rising out of the ashes of their marriage.
He thought of their daughter, Tegan. What the hell would she make of this? She'd loved Paul and she had called him Uncle Paul when she was a little girl. With a sudden lurch in his stomach he wondered if Tegan had known about her mother's self-declared three month leave of absence from her wedding vows?
If Tegan had known and had either approved of what her mother had done, or had just not cared enough to tell her father, then his relationship with Tegan would be in the balance, too. And that idea hurt him, badly.
He decided to send Tegan a text message and ask her to come back home as soon as she could. He felt a need to get all of this out into the open as soon as he could.
He saved the file to a flash drive and then emailed a copy of it to his Yahoo! account, in case Maeve tried to delete it when he confronted her when she returned home. He then printed the whole file, there were pages and pages of her infidelity in black and white.
She had been stupid to save it on the family computer, but who said people caught up in the excitement of an affair were capable of rational thought?
He sat in front of the computer. But it was not the cheating words on the screen that captivated his attention. In some almost primeval way, he needed to read of the infidelity with it laid out before him, ink on paper. So he printed all of the pages out.
He knew when it had started. Maeve had told Bob that she was worried about Paul. He was their best friend, Godfather to Tegan and he was dying of cancer. With no hope of treatment. So, she'd said: "Shouldn't we do something?" Bob had readily agreed. He would cut the lawns and do the gardening, offer any DIY work, whilst Maeve would use her nursing skills to tend to Paul's needs.
Tend to Paul's needs? Bob felt the bile rising. With an effort he stopped himself being sick.
They had started out by mocking Bob, by remarking on how gullible he had been. It was Paul who came up with the idea that was, to Bob's entirely reasonable view, the marriage killer.
He had proposed an idea to Maeve that she had accepted with alacrity. Paul's idea was a simple one. As many really evil ideas are. Maeve would get a virtual divorce from Bob for the duration of the remaining period of Paul's life. She would then 'marry' Paul, so that when she returned to her husband Bob it would be as Paul's widow. Her marriage to Bob would then automatically be re-instated, but Bob would not know that he had ever been divorced in the first place!
"That way," Paul had written, there will be no problems with you being unfaithful to Bob, as you would not be married to him!"
