I was the one who was going to deliver the surprise. Neither she nor he knew that I had found out about them. Or about this hideaway of theirs. It was an accidental discovery on my part, just as I had accidentally discovered their affair.
Just after Christmas last year, I was leaving to Mindanao for my project. The timing was poor because everybody, including my Filipino colleagues, were on holiday. But I had a deadline and only I could go to the village outside of Surigao, meet the persons I needed to meet, complete my report and have something to present to the renewable energy committee that paid for the project. Despite the hurry to leave and catch my plane, I had noticed the flip-flops in a corner of the garage that I rarely visited. I had been looking for my seldom used safety boots and there, beside the boots, were these blue house-slippers. They were not mine.
Over three hours later, safely on the plane, I had an epiphany looking down from twenty thousand feet at mountainous white clouds that filled my window. There was a guy in her past who had liked the colour blue. He often wore blue-coloured footwear. I remembered when I began dating her and we were introduced, that that habit was the thing that struck me most about him. He owned several pairs of blue footwear. I know because he wore a different one on each occasion we met, including my wedding day. I was sure it wasn’t a sentimental ornament that she – my wife – kept, because the pair looked new. Next to my dried, mud-caked boots, the flip-flops clearly stood out. In my mind, I was sure there was a more current reason for the presence of the slippers.