The Imaginary Husband

By Bailie Lawson

Paige is proud of being an independent woman, who doesn't need a man in her life. At the same time she has a strong need to hide her true self. It feels safer that way.
At times she finds it would be convenient to have a husband, especially in her dealings with coworkers. She starts to lie, first in small ways, creating the impression that she is married and that leads to surprising outcomes as she gets pulled deeper into the lie. She tells her co-workers she will be spending the New Year in the Caribbean with "Steve", and then surprises herself by actually booking a winter vacation on a small Caribbean Island.
Incredibly, a former lover – the one she chose as a template for “Steve” - is also vacationing on the same island and he is pretending to be someone else! Furthermore, he may have tried to kill his girlfriend. Paige becomes involved in unravelling the truth.

Her need to present a false self gradually diminishes as she spends time on the beautiful island with a low-key, attractive marine biologist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bailie Lawson
• Release date: Oct 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463350843

Bailie Lawson

Bailie Lawson has always been interested in stories, both listening to them and telling them. She was born and went to school in Ireland and as an adult has lived in New York and the North-Eastern United States. She has worked as a psychotherapist and professor of psychology. She is the author of several novels including Well-Travelled Ancient Ancient Artifacts, Finding Juniper, Fanfare, The Imaginary Husband, Pixie Dust: Enchantment and It’s Consequences, Uncovering Julien's Past, Una's Journey, and Who Is Gigi?

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The Imaginary Husband

BAILIE LAWSON

Copyright © 2021 Bailie Lawson

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9780463350843

Distributed by Smashwords

PAIGE

What do they see when they look at me? A spinster?

That word isn’t used any more. If I lived 100 years ago - even 50 years ago - I would be an elderly spinster, someone's maiden aunt. But isn’t that what I am? An elderly unmarried woman. I could be a character in one of Jane Austen's novels.

Do they feel sorry for me, the men at work? Do they think I have a dull joyless life? Or do they even notice me or care if they do notice me?

And what does Sander think? Why do I think he finds me attractive - a handsome happily married man like him? Am I imagining that? No, I don’t think so!

I don’t think he sees an elderly spinster when he looks at me. He sees an attractive professional woman in her forties.

Come on, Paige, you are dramatizing again, exaggerating, twisting the truth.

Maybe! But what happened anyway?

I wasn’t always a middle-aged spinster. I was young and pretty - some even said beautiful. But then I lost my confidence. I stopped believing in myself. I don’t understand what happened?

Was it really about Louis? Did he leave me so devastated, so unwilling to take a chance again? Or was I always this way? Did he just push me over the edge?

Well, whatever the truth is, this is crazy, Paige, even for you.

But why not?

Why not pretend to have a husband? Then you wouldn’t be a spinster. Or wouldn’t appear to be one.

And image is everything, so they say.

Besides, it would be useful - the pretending, not the real husband.

The pretending would mean I wouldn’t be asked questions about what I was doing for the holidays or at weekends. I could use the word we. I would have an easy excuse if I didn’t want to accept invitations.

And I wouldn’t have to deal with a real person who could make me doubt myself, hurt me. …A person who is charming at first but turns into something cruel and despicable. Like him. No, never again.

It is safer to be alone

CHAPTER 1

It started gradually. One day at work a woman Paige knew vaguely sat down at the table she was sharing with Roger in the cafeteria. They were having a quick casual bite to eat before heading to a meeting of the editorial group. The woman – Ellie something – was a relatively new employee in the PR department at their company, Broadhurst & Hunter Publishers, and after asking anxiously if she could join them, she confessed that Roger was one of the few people she knew.

Roger, pleasant, kind, talkative, introduced them and in between bites of his turkey sandwich on rye, started talking about having gone hiking in the woods with his son at the weekend.

Where did you go? Paige asked curiously.

There is a trail near Shoskana Falls Roger answered, really beautiful, very rustic.

Then looking quickly in her direction Don’t you have a house near there? Where is it? Near Algerton?

Yes, not far from there Paige answered.

Actually, it is really Steve’s house, then looking at Ellie He is my significant other. He lives there full-time, and I stay in the city during the week and go there at weekends.

Ellie laughed. Oh, a very modern marriage. I like it.

Paige didn’t correct her, didn’t say it’s not a marriage. There is no Steve. There is no significant other.

Roger didn’t seem surprised and didn’t comment. He and Paige weren’t exactly friends, more like friendly work colleagues.

But still. Had he always assumed she was married? Or had he never even thought about it? The latter was more likely.

Ellie was asking Does he work there?

Yes, he works from home Paige answered. He used to be a lawyer – technically he still is I suppose, - a lawyer - but he wanted a different life-style. So, he consults from home, occasionally drives into Boston for meetings, and at weekends we go out or entertain. So, he is not really a hermit.

Ellie nodded her understanding or acceptance, or both, and started to talk about her house and her three children, and soon she and Roger were comparing notes about their ten-year-old sons.

It is that simple. I just offer a little information and people accept it and go on to do what they really want which is to continue talking about themselves.

She had been playing with the idea for a while but that day she had taken a major step – a more deliberate step, because she worked with these people every day. But it wasn’t quite the beginning.

It all started really when she saw a photo of an old friend, Magda, on Facebook, smiling and gazing up blissfully at her husband. They were a couple. Magda looked older, no longer the strikingly beautiful woman from 25 years ago, but she seemed really content. In fact, Paige didn’t immediately know it was Magda in the photo. She had had to focus and saw with surprise that the happy couple looking like they had always been together were in fact Magda and her husband.

Of course, they hadn’t always been together. Magda must have been in her mid to late 40s when she met Ray. Until then she had been a determinedly liberated feminist who didn’t need a man. Paige had been quite surprised when she heard that Magda had got married.

Maybe it was her mood of the moment – though looking back, Paige didn’t remember being in a bad mood, or in a self-pitying mood that day. She had been in quite an upbeat mood that whole week in fact – tired, overworked, but feeling very positive about everything, nonetheless. She was feeling young and vibrant, years younger than her 51 years. She had started working on a new project with a much younger colleague. She was planning an adventurous vacation to Europe.

Maybe it was that feeling that anything was possible that made her reckless.

Out of nowhere Paige decided That’s what I want! I want to be in a couple, a happy couple.

This was a surprising realization. She had been content to be solitary for a long time, didn’t feel lonely. She wasn’t sure where this was coming from.

Oh yes, in the past, between relationships – mostly very stormy and heart-breaking relationships – she had wanted badly to be part of a couple again – a happy peaceful couple. But somehow over the years she had grown out of the need. She had focused on work, and friends. Relationships for her seemed to be filled with drama, especially the last one that had turned her into someone she didn’t recognize. She wanted peace.

She had never really made a decision to give up looking. She had just believed the women’s magazines which told her to live her life, do what interested her and she would meet someone compatible.

Well, they had been wrong. She had become so engrossed in her life that she never did notice if there were suitable men around much less try to meet them. She didn’t think there had been any - None that would knock her socks off anyway. And now she just assumed she would be alone into her sixties and seventies and eighties.

That hadn’t particularly bothered her until now.

But looking at that picture of Magda she remembered their shared soul-baring conversations when they had both been young and beautiful and painfully lonely and very single. Conversations about men who wouldn’t commit, or losers who might commit but who were unappealing. Who would want them? they asked each other.

Why should Magda now be the one showing off a husband? Paige was surprised to find that she resented that. It also reminded her of other anxiously single women she used to know, all in their 30s, some anxious to have children, others just wanting a husband. Many of them ended up with one or both. In a rare fit of petty spite Paige thought she had been more beautiful, more accomplished than them, more deserving of an adoring man.

If Magda could have a husband, then so could she! Or she could at least seem to have a husband.

The more reasonable part of her brain knew this was not exactly the right approach. This wasn’t a good reason to go looking for a husband. It was sheer competitiveness. Still, she thought about it off and on over the next few days. She thought a bit more about whether she really did want a husband. She might not really want one, and she would not say it was impossible, but it would not be easy at 51.

If she was honest with herself, there was someone she really did want, but he was happily married – and he was attracted to her. She was fascinated with this – the realization that they were attracted to each other but that she would not really deep down want to break up his marriage, even if she could. She wasn’t sure what she wanted. She was enjoying the mutual attraction. But why couldn’t she be involved with someone else and attracted to him? Maybe she wanted him to think she was involved with someone? She just didn’t know.

The other aspect was that having a husband was a convenient excuse. It could help her avoid unwanted situations.

One day at the gym, an overly friendly acquaintance, a bubbly blond woman, who periodically talked to her in the middle of her work-out on the treadmill, started to tell her about online dating sites. She was trying them out. Paige expressed polite curiosity, which was quickly misunderstood as interest, and soon the woman was trying to get her to go out for drinks to places where they might meet guys.

Paige found herself lying easily. She was involved. Yes, they had known each other for a while. They don’t live together but see each other at weekends. He has grown up children. He has been divorced a long time. She was surprised at how easily she made up the details of this imaginary man in response to the questions from this woman who was too nosey for Paige. At the gym Paige liked to listen to her music and focus on her workout, not chitchat inanely. She was sorry she had started talking to the woman at all.

That day she even asked Paige how old she was. Without missing a beat Paige said 42. The woman didn’t look surprised. Paige found that interesting. She knew she looked younger than her 51 years from how people treated her and what they said, but it was gratifying, nonetheless.

Then there was her nosy landlady and the fact that Paige was never home at weekends. One day when trapped into a conversation, Paige found herself telling the landlady she spent the weekend with her boyfriend.

She surprised herself. She didn’t know she was going to say that until the words were out of her mouth, hanging in the air between them. When questioned more by the landlady who was curious about where she went, Paige said he lived in the country about an hour away.

Paige normally tried to avoid the landlady, Mrs. Newsom. She didn’t particularly like her apartment, but it was large and cheap – but without a lease. She had therefore decided to buy a little place in the mountains, a place to go on summer weekends. A place where she could garden, sit on her private porch, and attempt to write her novel. It was beautiful and rustic and not expensive, but she still needed a mortgage. It would be the absolute worst time to have to pay more rent on her apartment. She decided the landlady did not need to know she owned property in the country, just in case it gave the impression she could pay a higher rent.

One lie led to another. Her hairdresser's place was not far from her apartment, and she discovered one day that one of the hairdressers – not Ellen, the one who did her hair – knew Mrs. Newsom, her landlady. As she got friendlier with her own hairdresser, she mentioned spending weekends in the country with her boyfriend. She needed to keep her story consistent.

So, it was really only people at work and old friends who had known her for years who might assume she was single – though she never actually said that. She realized she could have had a boyfriend all along and just not mentioned him. She didn’t normally talk about her personal life at work, and the old friends she saw infrequently.

She also realized she didn’t have to lie so blatantly to most people, especially people at work. She could just act as if she was in a couple. Some people constantly talked about their significant other by name, others never did, but would mention that we are doing this or that. But she needed to have a story in place in her head, even if she never told