Hammer Time

I return home from another tiring day at work, sweating from every conceivable crevice. Working through a heatwave isn’t exactly fun, but I’ve managed to make it to my own front door before face-planting the Victorian tiles. I’ll take that as a win. I slide the key into the front door, push it open and immediately hear the unmistakable sound of hammering. Bang. Bang. Bang. “Oh, thank Christ,” I mutter. Mat has finally got round to putting Maxi’s bedroom door back on its hinges. It fell off recently. Not gradually, either. It didn’t wobble loose over time. It simply decided it had had enough of being a door, walked out on its hinges, and has spent the last week sulking against Maxi’s bedroom wall. The poor lad is sixteen. Privacy isn’t exactly optional at that age. Mat promised he’d sort it. Eventually. It joined the ever-growing list of household jobs that live in the magical kingdom of “I’ll do it tomorrow.” So hearing hammering is unexpectedly comforting. It’s proof that at least one item has finally escaped the list. I hurry upstairs, smiling to myself, fully expecting to find Mat wearing one of those DIY tool belts, hammer hanging from one side, tape measure clipped to the other, looking every inch the capable handyman. Instead… I realise the sound isn’t coming from Maxi’s room. It’s coming from ours. Our bedroom. The smile quietly slips from my face. A strange unease prickles the back of my neck. The sort that arrives before your brain starts asking why. I push the bedroom door open and almost inhale my own sweat. “What the fuck is going on?” The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. Mat is… fully going for it. With some random woman. In our bed. Our bloody bed. The bed we’ve had sex in so many times I’m genuinely surprised it hasn’t collapsed under years of loyal service. The hammering stops instantly. They both look up at me like startled deer caught in headlights. “It’s… not what it looks like,” Mat blurts. I blink at him. Really? Because unless I’ve somehow interrupted an Olympic wrestling event, I’m fairly certain it’s exactly what it looks like. I glance around the room, as though another, far more reasonable explanation might be hiding behind the wardrobe. A film crew. A practical joke. An extremely unconventional game of Twister. Anything that lets me pretend, for just a few more seconds, that I haven’t walked into exactly what I think I’ve walked into. Before another word can be spoken, the woman launches herself out of bed and clambers through our open bedroom window wearing nothing but a tiny pair of knickers. I mean… who jumps out of a bedroom window? Bye, bitch. Off you bloody well run. I don’t move. I can’t. It’s as though someone has poured concrete around my feet. Everything around me suddenly feels unnaturally quiet. Even the birds outside seem to have stopped for a nosey. Truthfully, it’s the last thing I ever expected to come home to. I trust Mat. Implicitly. Cheating simply hasn’t crossed my mind for years. Not because we’re saints — we’re not — but because somewhere over the last decade all those old insecurities quietly packed their bags and left. There have been no suspicious questions, no checking his phone, no wondering where he is or who he’s with. I’ve had no need to. Until now. I can’t deny it. It’s knocked me for six. I look at him, but somehow I can’t quite see the man I’ve known for twenty-one years. Instead, I’m looking at a stranger wearing my husband’s face. I assume the worst of it has literally climbed out of the bedroom window. How wonderfully naïve of me. Because the woman who earns herself the nickname “the bunny boiler” is apparently here to stay. The messages begin almost immediately. Morning, afternoon, evening… It doesn’t seem to matter. Mat’s phone becomes a relentless stream of notifications. Eventually he blocks her number. Then she finds him on social media. Blocked again. Emails. Blocked. New accounts. Blocked. It’s like playing emotional Whac-A-Mole. Every time he blocks one account, another one pops up somewhere else. Then the gifts start arriving. One morning it’s an enormous wicker hamper stuffed full of all his favourite foods. The next day it’s a painfully cringeworthy love poem. The day after that… A pair of her skimpy knickers. Honestly. Who posts their underwear? “I don’t even know why she’d send these,” Mat says, holding them between two fingers like they’re radioactive. “I don’t care,” I reply. “They’re going straight in the bin.” If only that were the end of it. Every afternoon she appears outside our house carrying an acoustic guitar. I shit you not. She stands on the pavement serenading my husband with songs she’s apparently written about their one glorious afternoon together. A one-woman heartbreak tour, performed daily on our street, despite nobody having requested tickets. The neighbours are less than impressed. Not because of the affair. Because she can’t sing. At all. Every note sounds like she’s wrestling an angry goose into an air vent. “What are we going to do?” I ask one evening. Mat has practically become a recluse, peering through the curtains before daring to step outside. “I don’t know,” he sighs. “I’m beginning to wish I’d picked up a hammer instead.” “You and me both.” For the first time since all this started, I don’t hear an excuse. I hear regret. For all my anger, he looks genuinely remorseful. Ashamed. Broken. The strange thing is, he doesn’t look like someone who got away with something. He looks like someone who has finally realised exactly what he stands to lose. It’s difficult to stay furious with someone who is already doing a perfectly good job punishing themselves. But how do you move on from something like this? How do you rebuild trust when your betrayal is standing outside your own house murdering Wonderwall for the fifth consecutive day? “I’ll speak to her,” he finally says. “What?” “Face to face.” “And tell her what?” “That I love my wife.” I study his face for a moment. He’s terrified. Not of me. Of the mess he’s made. “Please do,” I sigh. “Before I lose the hearing in my good ear too.” I watch from the bedroom window, trying to look discreet but almost certainly failing. They stand on the pavement for what feels like an eternity before either of them speaks. “I love my wife,” I hear him tell her. She bursts into tears. There’s shouting. Then more tears. She pleads. He shakes his head. She pleads again. But this time he doesn’t move. She throws herself into his arms for one last desperate hug, and for a split second my heart doesn’t just splinter — it freefalls. Then she picks up her guitar. Slings it over her shoulder. Turns around. And walks away. Out of our lives. Or so I think. The following morning I’m walking to work when I hear footsteps behind me. At first I ignore them. It’s a public pavement. People walk behind other people all the time. But then I stop. Turn around. Nothing. Amanda… keep walking. It’s all in your head. I continue, but the footsteps return. Slow. Steady. Deliberate. Close enough that I can almost feel them breathing down my neck. This time I spin round so quickly I nearly lose my balance. That’s when I spot blonde curls poking out from behind a wheelie bin. “I know you’re following me,” I say firmly. “If you don’t stop, I’ll call the police.” Slowly she stands. She looks dreadful. Dark circles hang beneath bloodshot eyes. She hasn’t slept. Hasn’t eaten. For the briefest moment… I actually feel sorry for her. “I can’t do life without him,” she whispers. “What? Mat?” Of all the things I expect her to say, that isn’t one of them. She nods. I blink. Don’t get me wrong. I love my husband more than words can say. He’s been my favourite person since I was nineteen. My safe place. My home. But let’s be honest… He’s hardly what you’d call a classic heart-throb. Unless your thing happens to be dad bods, slightly greying hair, an increasingly questionable collection of hobbies and a sense of humour that occasionally needs subtitles. He’s wonderfully odd. Endearingly so. But ‘irresistible fantasy’ has never been the category I’d have put him in. Years ago, though… This would have terrified me. There was a time when Mat travelled constantly. We sometimes lived on opposite sides of the world, and every goodbye planted another seed of doubt in my head. What if he met someone else? Someone more adventurous. Someone who loved travelling as much as he did. Someone who wasn’t quite so… snail on the humpback whale. Those thoughts used to consume me. Not occasionally. Constantly. I’d lie awake imagining conversations that had never happened, women I’d never met and betrayals that existed only inside my own imagination. I’d convince myself that silence meant something. That a delayed text must have an explanation. That if I looked hard enough, I’d eventually find the thing I was so desperately afraid of. I’d check receipts in his pockets. Search his suitcase for clues. I’d even snoop through his phone once or twice. I’m not proud of it. Looking back now, I wasn’t searching for proof he’d been unfaithful. I was searching for reassurance that he hadn’t. There’s a difference. At the time, I couldn’t see it. Fear has a funny way of convincing you it’s protecting your heart, when really it’s quietly breaking it. It whispers that it’s keeping you safe, all the while stealing your peace. But that version of me disappeared years ago. No more snooping. No more spiralling. No more inventing stories where there weren’t any. I trust him. Wholeheartedly. Standing in front of this exhausted woman, with mascara streaked down her face and desperation pouring from every inch of her, I suddenly realise I’m not really looking at her anymore. I’m looking at someone else. Someone I haven’t seen for a very long time. She’s me. The younger Amanda. The frightened Amanda. The one who was so convinced she was going to lose the man she loved that she spent years searching for evidence that never existed. The one who couldn’t tell the difference between intuition and insecurity. She isn’t following Mat. She’s following me. She has been all along. She’s every insecurity I ever carried. Every sleepless night. Every imagined betrayal. Every fear that whispered, “he’ll leave.” And suddenly I don’t feel angry with her anymore. I feel sad for her. She spent so many years carrying a weight that was never hers to carry. And perhaps that’s what this dream has been trying to tell me all along. It isn’t really about cheating. It isn’t about walking in on my husband enthusiastically hammering something he absolutely shouldn’t have been. It’s about fear. About recognising the frightened woman I used to be and realising she no longer gets to steer my life. I smile. Not at her. At myself. Because somewhere along the way, without either of us really noticing, something changed. Trust stopped being something we had to fight for and quietly became the foundation we built life upon. I trust my husband. And he trusts me. Perhaps that’s the real repair happening in this dream. Not Maxi’s door. Not even my marriage. But the frightening part of me that spent years believing love could fall apart as easily as a door falling from its hinges. The woman smiles sadly back at me. Almost… proudly. Then, like the last trace of a bad dream disappearing with the morning light… She’s gone.