"...and the thunder rolls." -Garth Brooks; 'The Thunder Rolls'. [Playlist]
Prologue
It was ironic, she thought, to find herself in such an unsavory, cliché situation. She, a successful, self-assured, painfully confident professional woman, standing alone in the middle of the day in the drafty, bare laundry room, holding her husband's wrinkled, unwashed shirt.
She rarely did her husband's laundry; their schedules often worked against each other and he was perfectly capable and willing to do his own—which, she considered, as she stared at the bold smear of lipstick on the collar of this particular shirt, might have been due more to ulterior motive than to a progressive notion of household chore gender equality.
She held the garment a little closer, narrowing her eyes with cynical, hollow interest. The garish blot of lipstick stood out against the stark white of the shirt; she could not decide if it was a pinkish-red, or a purple-tinted-red. She supposed the exact colour was altogether irrelevant when she considered what this troublesome streak of lipstick indicated.
She felt dizzy for a moment, and the dizziness gave way to a vague, resigned irritation. She bit her lower lip and closed her eyes for a split second, opening them only to continue staring intently at this stain on her husband's shirt. Anger flared heatedly, subsided into melancholy, and settled into humiliated heartache in a sickening whirlwind.
She had seen the end coming for a good length of time now, but if it absolutely had to end like this—and that wasn't to say she hadn't entertained the suspicion that something might be going on behind her back—she found it to be a devastating blow to her pride that she was doomed to stumble across it by way of errant lipstick in the laundry room while performing such a domestic, housewife chore.
What frustrated her was that she knew Gibbs wasn't this stupid; he wasn't lazy, and—though he could be hurtful—he was far from malicious, and he never would have meant for his wife to find this. He was more careful; he would have tried to protect her, and that she knew how good of a man he could be infuriated her because this one careless accident of a lipstick-marred shirt hurt more than anything he had ever done.
The reason Diane Gibbs was so intensely paralyzed by this seemingly insignificant smear of lipstick was for no other reason than she was positive that none of the lipstick in her cosmetic repertoire was responsible for it.
-Alexandra.