There’s a calendar stuck to the side of Rachel’s fridge in Nottingham, the kind with a column for every member of the family. Swimming on Mondays. Dan’s five-a-side on Wednesdays. And on Thursday the 3rd of September, in her own column, a small pencil star. No word next to it. Just a star.
If you asked her what it meant, she’d tell you it was a dentist reminder. It isn’t.
Rachel is 44, married sixteen years, mum to a twelve-year-old and a nine-year-old who have both, in her words, “had a brilliant summer.” She means it. There was a week in a caravan near Filey, a day at Alton Towers that cost roughly the same as a small car, endless rounds of toast. She has been present for all of it — properly present, sun cream and boredom and card games in the rain.
And she has been counting the days until it ends since roughly the second week of July.
The affair that takes the summer off
Since February, Rachel has been seeing Chris. Also married, also two kids, also — and this mattered more than anything — on school hours. Their arrangement was almost embarrassingly practical. Thursday afternoons, after drop-off and long before pick-up: a window of about five hours that belonged to nobody but them. A pub with rooms roughly halfway between Nottingham and Leicester. His car in one car park, hers in another.
Then July arrived and the window shut. No conversation was needed; they’d both known it was coming. Six weeks of children at home means six weeks with no unaccounted-for hours in it, and neither of them was ever going to take risks in August. The whole point of Thursdays was that nobody had to tell any big lies. Summer would have demanded big ones.
So they did what a surprising number of our members quietly do, and paused. One WhatsApp message a week, kept deliberately dull. “Hope the holiday’s going well.” “Caravan survived the rain, just about.” Messages so beige that if anyone had ever read them, they’d have learnt nothing except that two boring people occasionally said hello. Deleted afterwards anyway, obviously. Because careful is careful, even when there’s nothing to find.
“It isn’t the kids I’m counting down from”
Rachel knows exactly how the crossed-off days look, and she’d like something on record: this is not a woman wishing her children away. “People would hear this and assume I can’t wait to get rid of them,” she told us. “It’s the opposite. I’ve loved this summer. But from July to September there’s Mum, there’s Dan’s wife, there’s the one who knows where the sun cream lives — and the woman Chris knows just gets paused. She’s the one I’m counting down for.”
That woman, by Rachel’s own account, laughs at different things. Wears the good perfume rather than saving it. Talks about the books she’s actually read instead of school-gate logistics. Dan isn’t cruel and he isn’t cold — she’s quick to say so. He’s a decent man she’s been running a household with for sixteen years. But somewhere between the second baby and his second promotion, they stopped being curious about each other. Nobody chose it. Nobody noticed it happening. Thursday afternoons are simply where her curiosity went instead.
Has the pause worried her? A little, she admits. Six weeks is a long time to leave something unattended, and there were moments — usually around ten at night, picking wet towels off a caravan floor — when she wondered whether Thursdays would still be there in September. Then Chris’s weekly message would land, beige as ever, and she’d understand it perfectly for what it was. A pilot light. Not much to look at. Still lit.
The last week is always the longest
Which brings us to now: the strange, saggy final stretch of the holidays. School shoes bought and boxed. Uniforms hanging on bedroom doors like costumes for a play nobody’s rehearsed. The kids scratchy and ready to go back, whatever they claim. And Rachel ironing name tapes at the kitchen table, watching the days finally pick up speed.
Ask around our membership and you’ll hear the same thing again and again: September, not January, is the real new year. The house empties, the routines return, and those quiet midweek hours — the ones nobody in the family ever asks about — come back like the tide. Some members guard the first Thursday of term more carefully than their wedding anniversary.
Rachel’s pencil star is for the 3rd. She’s already decided what she’s wearing.
And if a small mark on your own kitchen calendar means something nobody else in the house would ever guess — you already know where to find us at IllicitEncounters.com.
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