The search history

Fiction, about adults over 18. Nothing is discovered and nobody is caught. A woman spends nine hours rehearsing a conversation and then decides to have a different one.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

My husband of eleven years asked at about ten past nine on a Saturday, holding his own laptop, which had done the thing it does where the trackpad stops working until it feels better.

"Can I borrow yours for an hour? I want to get the car sorted before the price goes up again."

And I said, "Yeah, course," in a voice that came out completely normal, and went upstairs and stood in the bathroom with the taps running.

Let me tell you what was actually on that laptop, because the answer is almost nothing, and that turns out to be the entire point.

No account on anything. No messages to anybody. No photographs. I have never met a single person, I have never spoken to a single person, I have never so much as made a profile on the site everybody uses.

What there was, was a browser I keep separate for it, and inside that browser a history stretching back about two and a half years, and a set of bookmarks with no folder name because I could not think of anything to call it that was not worse than nothing.

Reading. That is all it is. Two and a half years of reading, mostly between eleven at night and one in the morning, mostly the same eight or nine pages over and over, the way you reread a letter.

He was on it for two hours and ten minutes.

I know because I checked the clock roughly every four minutes from the utility room, where I did an amount of laundry that our household does not generate.

Insurance takes forty minutes. Insurance does not take two hours and ten minutes. Insurance takes two hours and ten minutes if a man is comparing quotes and reading terms and being thorough, which is exactly what he is like, or if a man has stopped doing insurance.

At one point he laughed at something and I had to put my hand flat on the washing machine.

Here is the strange part, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.

Somewhere in that second hour, standing in a utility room folding a towel I had already folded, the feeling changed. It went from dread into something I could not name for a while and eventually recognised as disappointment.

Because part of me wanted him to have found it.

Not to be caught. Caught is the wrong word and it is the word my body was using, but it was not accurate. What I wanted was for it to be over. For the telling, which I have been failing to do for two and a half years, to have been done by an accident, so that I never had to summon the thing that I have demonstrably never been able to summon.

I wanted to be relieved of the responsibility for my own life. Which, if you know anything about what I had been reading for two and a half years, is quite a funny thing to notice about yourself while holding a towel.

He gave it back at twenty past eleven, said the insurance was ninety quid less with a different lot, and asked whether I wanted a bacon sandwich.

That was it. That was the whole of it. He had not found anything, because he had no reason to look, because he is a man who opens a browser to do a job and closes it again.

We had bacon sandwiches. He talked about the excess.

I spent the rest of that day in a state I can only describe as postponed.

Every time he came into a room I thought, this is it, he has been thinking about it all afternoon and now he is going to say something. He did not say anything, because there was nothing to say. But I got nine hours of the feeling of being about to be asked, and by about six in the evening I had worked something out that I had been avoiding for a very long time.

Which is that I had been living for two and a half years in exactly this state anyway. Just at a lower volume. Every time he used my phone. Every time he picked up the tablet. Every time I closed a laptop lid slightly too quickly when he came in with the tea.

That is not a secret. That is a small permanent tax on every ordinary evening, and I had been paying it without noticing, and Saturday just sent me an itemised bill.

I have not told him yet. I want to be honest about that, because the tidy version of this story is that I told him on the Sunday and it went beautifully, and that is not what happened.

What happened is that I wrote it down. Not for him. For me, on the Sunday morning, in the notes app, sitting in the car outside Sainsbury's, about four hundred words explaining what it is I actually want, in language I would be prepared to say out loud.

It took an hour and a half and I cried twice, which was unexpected and embarrassing given the location.

The first version was all justification. Two hundred words about how this is more common than people think, and a bit about how it does not mean anything is wrong with our marriage, and a paragraph that was frankly a legal defence. I read it back and realised I had written a document designed to survive being argued with, which told me quite a lot about what I have been expecting from him, none of it fair.

The second version was four sentences. What I want, how long I have wanted it, that it is nothing he has done or not done, and that he can take as long as he likes to think about it. That one I could read without my throat closing.

And the useful thing I found out is that the hard part is not him. I have been telling myself for two and a half years that I have not said anything because of how he might react. That is not true, or it is about a fifth true.

The rest of it is that until Sunday morning I could not have told you, in a sentence, what I was actually asking for. I did not have the words. You cannot ask for a thing you cannot name.

So the plan, such as it is, is that I have got the words now and they are written down and I have read them enough times that they have stopped sounding like somebody else.

And I am going to say them, out loud, to a man who has been married to me for eleven years and who spent two hours saving us ninety pounds and then made me a bacon sandwich.

Not because I am brave. Because I have decided I would rather do it than continue to hope that a broken trackpad does it for me.