SFA

Two years after Diana's death he stood at her grave, looking at the headstone. Despite having wanted to, he had resisted the urge to have something pithy and to the point such as "Slut!" chiselled onto the headstone.

Instead, he had agreed with her parents that the wording would be "Diana Brookman, ne Sanders, 1988 to 2020, daughter, sister, wife."

The publicity surrounding the case had eventually died down, her lover had moved back up North and with the insurance money on her life, David was able to sell the flat and move into a nice house in a decent part of town.

Before Pierce returned to his hometown, he had asked for a meeting with David. David had felt ambivalent about meeting with him. After all, he had been his wife's affair partner and had, albeit accidentally, caused her death.

David decided to meet him for coffee in the Costa coffee shop in the centre of town. David had dismissed the idea of meeting up in a pub because he realised that meeting up with the bastard who had killed your wife, even though she'd turned out to be nothing but a strumpet, and mixing that encounter with alcohol would almost certainly be a very, very stupid and dangerous idea.

He had thought he would want to hurt his wife's lover, but when they met over a couple of Americanos at a table near the side window of the coffee shop, David was disappointed.

He'd wanted to hate Pierce, a man who he had vaguely known because they'd sort of met several times before the affair had started at functions at Diana's workplace, but when they met in the coffee shop, he could see that Pierce was a broken man. David gained some comfort from this. He'd heard of the German word schadenfreude, for which the only nearest English translation was "malicious joy," and yes, he did feel malicious joy at the fact that Pierce appeared to be suffering. "Fucking good job if you are suffering, you cunt! You caused my wife to die!" he thought.

"I'll not insult your intelligence by saying that I'm sorry for what happened to Diana, but even so, I'm bloody sorry about what happened."

David nodded, absently. Abruptly, he said, "Why did she cheat on me? Had she stopped loving me? Was she going to leave me for you?"

"Shit, no! She did really love you to bits, as she'd told me. In fact, the picture she painted of you was of her Mr. Very Right. In fact, she was so proud of your achievements that I started to feel uncomfortable, because I thought 'look, I'm single, I've really got nowt to lose, but you have a lot to lose.'

"I asked her one day why risk all she had with you for a bit of extracurricular sex with me once or twice a week?

"She seemed shocked about why I'd asked the question, but she answered it by saying what she and I had was just a bit of fun, nothing serious, and that as you would never find out about it, what harm could it possibly do?"

Pierce shuddered before continuing. "But it did cause harm, because it led to her death. And I killed her. I killed your wife. But she was so pleased the last time we met to tell me that she was going to carry your babies and give you children."

Tears came to Pierce's eyes and he dabbed them away with a Costa Coffee paper napkin. The irony that Pierce was wiping his tears away with a napkin made with recycled paper that bore the legend: "Our napkins have been cleaning happy faces since 1971" was not lost on David.

It was at that point that the feeling of schadenfreude that had been buoying David up began to fade. He didn't want to feel sorry for Pierce, and even now there was a base, atavistic call for him to beat the shit out of him. He had to learn more of the affair.

"How did you get together, first?"

"Oh, it was just that we were working together on a project, we had to do a few work sessions where we worked through lunch and we got chatting and we both felt a connection. Are you sure you want me to continue?"

David nodded, not wanting to hear, but feeling a need to.

The story that Pierce related was trite and quite pitiful, because it was the story of almost every cheating, adulterous relationship since before King David and Bathsheba when King David had her husband Uriah the Hittite killed to get him out of the way. Right down to when Diana, David's wife, got herself killed because she allowed her lover the luxury of, one time, filling her with his poisonous, toxic semen.

"Why did you go to the hospital with her?" The question had suddenly come to David.

Pierce shrugged and looked him in the eye. "Because although I didn't know that it was my semen that was making her ill, I knew it was my responsibility to be there with her, to be there for her. I knew you'd have wanted to be with her, but because I never had your phone number, I couldn't call you and let you know she was ill."

David nodded and thanked him for what he'd said.

The conversation petered out after a few more seconds, and Pierce told David he was going to return to his home in Northern England.

As they parted, they did not shake hands, but each, in their own way, felt somewhat better. To his shock, David was glad he hadn't knocked Pierce's block off. Though at one point it had been on the cards.

Because Diana's company had double indemnity life insurance on all of their senior employees, it paid double the amount. The insurer tried to claim that the double indemnity clause was void, because it excluded natural causes.

That defence failed because the coroner had the ability to rule that it was a death by natural causes but hadn't done so, but had rather decided to declare it as Death by Misadventure, which, legally speaking, was considered as an accidental death.

A further two years on David was standing in the lounge of his new four-bedroom house. He adjusted his tie in the mirror and went out to date his... psychiatrist? No. Nothing as cliché as that. Although he was dating her younger sister, Chiara, who had come to the UK to study for her PhD in Computer Sciences.

They had met accidentally as he was leaving his last session with her sister and she was waiting to take her out to a meal after work.

David and Chiara had started talking computers. He had admired her Voodoo Envy H171 laptop, which she was using to check her emails whilst she waited in the otherwise empty waiting room.

After she spoke with her sister to ask for her advice, Chiara she agreed to go out on a date with David when he asked her. Carli wasn't keen at first, but when she saw how well they were doing as a couple she gave a New York shrug, and said, "Good luck to you both!"

After dating for three years, he announced that he was taking her to the National Computing Museum at Bletchley Park. She squealed with delight, jumped excitedly and shouted, "Wow! So I can look at the Colossus computer and the Harwell Dekatron? Awesome!"

He grinned at her enthusiasm, which as a fellow geek, he shared. He privately hoped that the rest of the day would be equally welcome to her.

They saw everything at least once, some things twice, or three times in the case of Colossus and the Harwell Dekatron.

They spent a good deal of time and money in the gift shop and repaired to the small café at the museum where, as if by magic, two smiling staff members dressed in borrowed waiter's uniforms, bearing two glasses and a bottle of Champagne stepped forward as before a group of delighted onlookers, David went down on one knee in front of Chiara and presented her with a beautiful engagement ring which he had custom made by an artisan on Etsy who made rings to special order using recycled computer components.

With tears in her eyes and slipping the ring on her finger, she hugged him, pulled him back on to his two feet and shouted, "Yes!"

The onlookers, mainly a collection of geeks and their bemused spouses or partners, clapped and cheered. At her delighted shout of "The ring! The ring is made from recycled computer parts!" the onlookers really became animated, and some even wanted their photographs taken with the blushing couple.

That sealed the deal, really. Like her older sister, Chiara decided to settle down in England and took UK Citizenship. "Are you sure about giving up your US citizenship?" David had asked her. She grinned at him. "Oh, I don't have to give up my US citizenship. That's not been a thing for absolute years! Thing is, I want our baby to be born to parents who are both British!"

He tried to speak, but like the old Meatloaf song said, "You took the words right out of my mouth, Oh, must have been while you were kissing me."

Of course, Carli was thrilled because she got to be Auntie Carli, and also the twin's Godmother. Yeah, twins. Two sets of twins, within six years.

It was almost as if the Universe were trying to make amends for a past glitch in the matrix, David thought.