Lincoln Darnell knew he had a perfect marriage. He would have bet the farm--figuratively--on having a perfect marriage. PERFECT. P-e-r-f-e-c-t. In his own words, as he told so many people, "absolutely fucking perfect."
That was until five minutes earlier, when he grabbed his wife's cell phone to call the local Pizza Hut to order a couple of pizzas and two orders of breadsticks after he and his wife, Penny, and their two children had spent much of the afternoon raking leaves in their yard. As Lincoln was putting away the rakes and leaf bags, Penny went upstairs for a quick shower. When Lincoln went into the house, he spotted his wife's phone on the kitchen counter, so he reached for it to call. Neither he nor his wife ever locked their phone, so it was just easier to grab her phone than get his from the family room.
No one could have been more surprised than Lincoln when the phone asked for a password as it came to life. He and his wife both agreed never to password protect their phones when they first got theirs more than 14 years ago right after they were married. He knew it was not locked the last time he used it... was that almost a year ago, he questioned himself?
"Huh. Odd," he thought to himself as he put down her phone and went into the family room for his.
Lincoln called in his order and plopped down in his favorite La-Z-Boy to think. There could have been dozens of reasons for Penny's phone to be passworded, but the most obvious was... well... obvious. He put his head in his hands, but before he could start feeling sorry for himself, his 10-year-old son walked into the room.
"I'll go with you to pick up the food, Dad," he said as Lincoln's head shot up.
"Right. Thanks. We'll go in five minutes," Lincoln answered.
Lincoln couldn't get too much thinking done on the ride to and from the restaurant because his son was nattering on about the day's college football games. The kitchen table was also the wrong place for this discussion, he knew, if... if there was to be one. For the first time in his married life, he had doubts about his wife.
Penny Darnell also thought she had a perfect marriage, although her definition of perfect was far different from that of her husband. Like Lincoln, she had unlimited love, respect and trust for her spouse, but her definition of perfect included a clueless husband who had no idea that she had been having an affair behind his back for the past year.
Penny didn't seek out the affair, but didn't shy away from it when it happened. An actuary by trade, her analytical nature was able to separate her marriage from her affair. Then she was able to separate her love for her husband from the love she developed with Steve Bates. In effect, she had been leading a double life for the past year. With careful planning and by not wasting any time feeling guilty, she felt she was getting way more than 100 percent out of her days, giving her family nothing less than 100 percent and Steve the extra percentage she was wringing out of her busy but fulfilling life. While most people were seeking to live their lives to the fullest, she felt she was going beyond 100 percent. If she had to quantify it, she felt she was living her life 150 percent.
The only fly in the ointment for Penny was that she knew she couldn't tell her husband. She knew Lincoln could never accept her second life, would never believe that she could love two men, even if she had been doing that very thing for the past year.
Lincoln knew he had several hours of alone time when Penny went across the street to have coffee with her friend, Angela, while both kids were out with friends the next day. That would give him more than enough time to scrutinize the family's phone bills for the last several months. When they signed up for their current plan, Lincoln had taken the option to have calls listed on the bill, like a business plan. Penny didn't call any one number an inordinate number of times, but there were four that showed up on a regular basis that he couldn't connect.
Lincoln smiled to himself when he bought the burner phone, feeling like he was on a "spy mission" of sorts. He called all four numbers and determined that a man named Steve Bates was the answer to his unasked question. Lincoln wasn't exactly without skills, and in less than a week found out that Steve Bates was an assistant vice president at a near-by financial services firm.
The information that Lincoln found on Bates' Facebook account told the story of a 26-year-old with an Ivy League education who seemed to be moving up in the world and had several hundred friends on the site, for whatever that was worth. Photos showed a tall, well-built, handsome man. That was more than a little worrisome to Lincoln.
Lincoln had to admit to himself that if his wife was having an affair, not only was she amazingly good at hiding it, she was amazingly good at keeping her life in order. She worked a full-time job, was a great mother to the couple's two kids, and up until he started checking on her, he thought she loved him as much as he loved her.
Penny found Steve Bates "charming and delightful"--his term for himself--when he introduced himself to her and her two workmates while they were eating lunch at a restaurant close to where they worked. Penny thought the introduction was ballsy and had to admit she liked his brash attitude, especially since two of the three women at the table were wearing wedding rings. Steve seemed particularly taken with Penny, despite her being about 10 years older than him.
Penny flirted back shamelessly with the young man. Her two workmates expressed surprise that she seemed so up for this. She gave the young man her cell number when the women finished their lunch.
"What the hell do you think you were doing back there, Penny?" one of her workmates asked on the ride back to the office.
"I'm not really sure... but I felt a connection with him, and I know he felt it as well. I'm not going to sleep with him, but I think I'd like to see where this connection could go. This is how I felt when I met Lincoln," she replied.
"Play with fire much, girl?" her friend asked.
The two were soon doing lunches alone. They both had flextime hours, and a lunch hour soon became two. Despite what she had told her friends, she did eventually sleep with the man, and their two hours became three. She started working 30 minutes later four days a week and on Thursday nights stayed a full hour later. She told her husband that she needed to put the extra time in due to an increased workload. Being completely trusting of his wife, Lincoln never questioned the increased hours, and to help out, started cooking dinners on Thursday evenings.
This had become the pattern for the past year. The relationship started out as a flirty friendship and gradually--easily, in fact--grew intimate. It felt so natural, though, that Penny had little if any guilt, in part because she made absolutely sure that she never gave Lincoln and her children any less love and attention. It wasn't always easy to keep her two lives separate, but she felt more alive and energized in her life than she had in the last several years. She had her loving family with all the wife and mom things, and then a handsome, younger lover who was smart, articulate and well-read, someone who made her feel nothing like a wife and mother.
The only ones who knew about the affair were her two workmates who were there on the first day when Steve Bates introduced himself. Penny never admitted anything to the other women, but when she started taking her long lunches on Wednesdays, their suspicions were answered. The three, however, never talked about Penny's lover... at least with Penny.
Lincoln's Christmas gift slush fund paid for a private investigator to confirm what he already knew. That didn't mean the pain was one iota less when he received the report, which included photos that somehow appeared to be from inside her lover's apartment.
"These photos weren't obtained legally, so you won't be able to use them in front of a judge, but it might make a difference in negotiations," the private investigator said.
"I-I never saw it coming," Lincoln admitted to the man. "Fourteen years. I was positive we were going to go the distance. I loved that woman with everything I have, and this is how she pays me back? Fu-u-uck!"
Although it just about killed him, Lincoln took a page from his wife's book and acted as normal as possible for the next three days, waiting until the kids were in bed on a Friday night before broaching the subject. He was reclined back in his La-Z-Boy ostensibly watching a hockey game and Penny was doing a crossword puzzle.
"Do you love him, Penny?" Lincoln asked quietly, glancing over at his wife.
