La Belle Infidele

Lisa Llewelyn nee Fitzgerald should have been happy. Lisa Llewelyn nee Fitzgerald should have been ecstatic. She and her husband Richie had finally achieved what they had worked and planned for. Years of saving, research, and delayed gratification had finally culminated in their acquisition of a house and dental practice in a medium-sized, friendly town with good schools and regular trains to New York City. Lisa Llewelyn nee Fitzgerald should have been happy, but instead she was uneasy. Lisa Llewelyn nee Fitzgerald did not need ask herself why she felt uneasy, she knew. Like termites in the timbers of a house, or the proverbial one rotten apple in the barrel, there was something she was hiding, something she had been hiding from the world, but mostly from Richie, for years. It was a small thing really, something that in retrospect had been better revealed years ago. It would be past them now, forgotten. Instead, it rustled ominously on the edges of her consciousness, like squirrels in the walls.