I asked him to sit down. At first, he seemed hesitant, standing there with his dripping jacket still hanging off him. Then his eyes wavered, and he searched out the chair.
“Well?” he asked, leaning forward. His hand was strangling his hat in a massive fist.
“I’ve been monitoring your wife for a month now,” I began. There was no color in his face. “You were worried,” I added, “that—”
“Say it,” he suddenly blurted. He had leapt from his chair.
“Mr. Hue, I have uncovered something.”
“Is she having an affair?” he asked.
Shaking my head, I pushed the file across the desk. He tore it open like a hyena a gazelle. He saw the pictures. Nearly every day, while he was at work, I had taken a picture of his wife and a man entering their house. It was a thick folder.
All the bluster went out of him in a moment, and he deflated. His legs collapsing beneath him, he fell back into the chair. Taking up a picture, he would stare at it fixedly; then it would fall from his hand onto the floor, and he would grab the next one.
“It’s what I feared,” he sobbed.
“No,” I said.
He looked up at me, eyes red, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“No?” He shook the remaining stack of photos in my face. “What are these then? Who are these men?”
“An affair,” I said, “would be one thing. This is worse than an affair.” His eyes bore into mine. “Men,” I remonstrated. “Not a man. Never the same man twice. I’ve watched your house. This whole month long, I’ve seen your wife lead a menagerie of strange men into your home, but not once, not in the whole of the last thirty days, have I seen any one of them leave.”
Tale Told 