Three is a crowd: Diane is not about to stop

(Continued from last issue)

David and Diane have been married for years; then there is Julie, the young secretary whose axis collides with the couple’s in ways none of them saw coming.

DAVID

After I left the house, I drove around aimlessly for over an hour stewing over everything Diane had said, and trying to process it all. Could she be right? Was Julie only with me just for what she hoped she could get out of me?

Could I really have been so wrong about her all along? Was she just a gold-digger as Diane claimed? I considered myself a great judge of character, and my gut told me that Julie’s affection and innocence was genuine, and yet, I could not ignore the fact that she had asked me to title part of the Katosi site to her, which raised the question – had that been her end goal all along?

While I had not originally had any particular destination in mind at the time I left the house, I wound up at my parents’ home. I suppose that made sense, for although I was by no means a ‘mama’s boy’, of all the women in my life, my mother was the only one I could truly trust at this point, and no matter what her opinion was about my disheveled state of mind, at least I could be certain that there would be no ulterior motive attached to it.

My sister was in the kitchen when I arrived, and she told me my mother was in what was probably her favourite place to be – her garden – so that was where I headed.

“David!” she exclaimed in a mixture of surprise and delight. “Hi Mum; how are you?” I greeted her with a peck on each cheek.

“I’m alright; how are you? I wasn’t expecting you today; is everything alright?” she asked, her tone changing from surprise and delight to suspicion and concern.

“Yeah, everything’s fine; I just wanted to see you,” I answered quietly.

Maybe it was the lack of conviction in my tone, or maybe just a mother’s intuition, for she obviously did not believe me.

“Come, let’s go inside; your sister can make us some tea, and we’ll talk,” she invited me kindly. I nodded with a soft, sad smile, and we headed back to the house.

DIANE

I was not unduly bothered by David’s reaction when he found out about my visit to the site and what I had said to his whore, or the way he had stormed off after our talk.

After more than ten years of marriage, I knew from his reaction that my words had struck a chord, so my mission had been a success, and that success only motivated me to press on and hammer in the final nails in the coffin of his foolish affair.

I had finally gotten him to see that his whore was a gold-digger; now I intended to show him that she was a slut as well.

This would obviously be harder to do than the first part of my plan had been, as it involved a third party who might not be as easy to manipulate, but I was determined to try; so, picking up my phone, I scrolled through the contacts, found the name I was looking for, and then taking a deep breath, dialed the number.

“Good morning, Doctor Kenneth speaking,” his voice came over the line.

“Good morning, this is Mrs Mujuni,” I introduced myself simply. There was a slight pause, and when he next spoke, he did not sound quite as confident or assured as he initially had: “Mrs Mujuni, good morning; how may I help you?”

“Oh, it’s not me that needs your help, but I suspect my husband’s mistress might,” I answered coolly. Once again there was a pause, this time slightly longer than the first.

“What makes you think that?” he finally asked. “Well, let’s just say I have ‘insider information’,” I answered cryptically.

“Mrs Mujuni, with all due respect, I’m a very busy man, so you’re going to have to give me more than that, for me to interrupt my day to go help someone who ‘might’ need it.”

“I’m sorry, I obviously overestimated how much you cared about her; I won’t take up any more of your busy day,” I answered, and then hung up before he could respond, my heart racing with nervous excitement.

Men are so predictable; I was confident the ‘very busy’ doctor would go running to the aid of David’s whore like some knight in shining armour. When he did, I would be there to capture it, and just like that, the second part of my mission would fall into place.

JULIE

After David stormed out of the apartment, it felt like my heart was breaking, and I cried until I could cry no more.

When the driver arrived to pick me up, I gave him the keys to the store to take to the site engineer, claiming I was not feeling well to explain away my puffy eyes and disheveled appearance.

Besides the hurt of David’s explosive reaction to the mere suggestion that he put my name on the title of just the manager’s unit at the site, was the fear of what that reaction implied.

I thought I had found security for not just myself, but more importantly Junior, when David made me the manager of the site and began building the manager’s unit above the administrative office, but that sense of security was now completely gone, and even though I could not stand his wife, I now had to consider the fact that perhaps there was merit in her warning that I didn’t have any part of anything David owned.

Furthermore, since David had been so angry with me when he left, I did not even know where I stood with him at that very moment. Did I for instance, still have my job at the site, now that I had dared to ask him for just a small part of it, or did he no longer trust my motive for being there in the first place?

And how about this apartment; was he going to continue paying the rent for it, or were Junior and I about to find ourselves homeless? Did he even want our relationship to continue, or was that over now?

In the midst of all these questions, my phone rang, and I quickly snatched it up, praying desperately that it was him calling to say that now that he had cooled down, and thought about it, he realized he had been wrong, and was on his way back.

However, I froze when I looked at the screen and saw that it was not David calling, but rather Kenneth! Why on earth was he calling, and why now, of all times?

I did not know, and I didn’t have the energy to find out just then, so I ignored the call, and let it ring and ring. He called back twice more in quick succession, and both times I ignored the call, until to my relief, he finally gave up and stopped calling.

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