NOVEL EXCERPT
I Believe in What I See
Chapter 3 The Love We Had
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Write and publish a book review of the novel The Love We Had, based on freely chosen chapters published on medium.com.
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Chapter 3 I Believe in What I See
I’m not a very suspicious person. I believe in what I see and I have always believed in her before. I have not had reason to be suspicious of her because she was always a reliable person and always does what she says she should. I know everything about her, I thought. I usually thought so. But sometimes the doubts were there, I had to admit to myself
Yesterday — like always earlier — I had been in complete control, I thought. But it had happened a couple of times over the past year that I had felt that something was wrong — something was wrong there in the house. One day, about half a year back in time, when I was home from work and she was out on an errand, I had taken advantage of the fact that she was not home to go to the PC and look at her e-mail.
I had struggled to enter, because she had changed the password, and I was trying to think logically, because she often used the kids’ names and birthdates. When I finally got in, I heard her enter the hallway downstairs, and I had to shut down the PC in a hurry.
She discovered that I had been in her email, because I didn’t have enough time to log off. I saw a little later that day that she was suspicious and more than that, I thought she was a little nervous about what I could have seen. She said I was not allowed to access her email, that it was not right. I did not disagree with that, and I nodded.
A few months after this, I went again with a growing anxiety inside. I had a feeling that things were happening that I had no record of. She seemed rather different than usual, tense, almost irritable, but at the same time also a little happier at times.
I decided to try to find out more again, after finding a piece of paper she had hidden in one of the kitchen cabinets with passwords that she struggled to remember.
One morning, one day when she was going to the village to visit her parents, I said at work that I had to go out for an hour or so, and that I would take that time back by staying over time a couple of afternoons in the near future.
I opened the PC and sat with a beating heart while waiting for the PC to finish logging on. I did not succeed entering her e-mail account on the first attempt, but it turned out that I had made a mistake, because on the second try it went well.
I opened the inbox and began to read. There weren’t that many emails there, and I didn’t find that surprising. The large majority of messages were from senders whom I understood were subscriptions, and some friends and relatives
But I noticed that she had received some e-mails from a person I did not know. The sender's name was the same as the email address, «friendly75», and was a blink of an eye. But it was no more than 2–3 emails, and I thought it was hardly anything special about them. Except for an email where the sender seemed to have written a slightly cryptic message:
“As agreed, same loc and tm as last :)” Smiley face.
I took the time to look at the outbox as well, but found nothing that aroused suspicion there. I sat back with two or three slightly suspicious messages, and I tried to think what they could mean, especially a message saying that he or she who wrote was so happy because they had found out about this issue.
A note from the author:
The novel “The Love We Had” is made up of three parts, where the three main characters tell how they experienced what happened. Part 1 The Longest Night -told by Lars Part 2 The Light Inside -told by Aslak Part 3 Save Our Secret Love -told by Eira
If you liked reading, you can find more here.
Links to previous and later chapters:
Part 1
Chapter 1 I Love It When Things Are Normal
Chapter 2 I Came Home as Usual