The Vow of Silence: A Lover on the Gold Coast

I read the news on my phone last Tuesday. ABC News reported that a man had been charged after a woman was shot dead in a Gold Coast home. The details were brutal, but what stayed with me was the phrase “domestic incident.” It reminded me of how easily a life can be reduced to a headline, and how much we choose not to say. I live in a city that trades on sunshine and spectacle, but the real currency here is discretion. I’ve learned that the hard way.

I’m forty-six, a bookbinder and restorer by trade. I work out of a small studio cluttered with presses, leather scraps, and the faint smell of hide glue. My cat, Miso, sleeps on the workbench, and the spider plant by the window is perpetually brown at the tips, I keep forgetting to water it. I’ve been divorced for seven years. My fifteen-year-old daughter lives with her mother in Brisbane; I see her every second weekend, and we talk about her music and her maths homework. That part of my life is steady, known, and spoken.

The other part is not.

I am a lover Gold Coast residents would never notice. Not the husband, not the man who leaves his socks on the floor or forgets anniversaries. I am the one who arrives late, leaves early, and pays in cash. The one who knows your coffee order before you do, because I’ve had time to learn it in the dark. This is not a confession. I own my choices the way a restorer owns a cracked spine: carefully, without regret, and with full knowledge of the pressure required to hold it together.

The First Silence: Discretion

People think an affair is about lies. It’s not. It’s about silences. The first silence is the one you build around yourself, the space where no trace of her exists. No messages saved, no photographs, no receipts. I have learned to read a room the way I read a binding: for stress points, for weak seams. When we meet at HOTA Gallery on a Friday afternoon, we stand two feet apart in front of a painting, our shoulders not quite touching. We speak in plain sentences, like two colleagues discussing an exhibition. The guard never looks twice.

Last month we drove north to watch a film together, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. The entire film is about what happens in the spaces between words: the stairwell, the hotel corridor, the shared cigarette. She held her breath during the final scene. I felt her pulse in my palm, but I did not reach for her. That is the discipline. The affair is not a rebellion; it is a ritual. I protect the secret because I respect what she has built elsewhere. Disparaging her husband would be like blaming a book for having a different cover.

The Second Silence: Anticipation

The second silence is the one that lives inside me between meetings. It is the most alive part of my week. I schedule my restorations around a text, a single emoji, a time, a place. The waiting is a form of pressure, like the weight I apply to a spine during rebinding. It holds everything together.

We meet at the Burleigh Pavilion on a Tuesday evening, when the crowd is thin and the light is soft. She arrives ten minutes after me. We order drinks, talk about the weather, about the new pool contract the Gold Coast firm won in Townsville, I read about it in the local paper. Beneath the table, her shoe touches mine. That is all. The anticipation is the point. The moment that matters most is the one I never describe, the one that exists only between two people in a room with a locked door. What happens there belongs to us. What I remember is the scent of her perfume on my pillow the next morning, the way my coffee tasted different, sharper, sweeter, the morning after.

I do not romanticise the difficulty. It is a luxury to choose this. I could walk away tomorrow; so could she. But we don’t, because what we have is not a hole we are filling. It is a separate room we built together, with its own walls, its own silence, its own climate. It is a breath of air in a city that can feel as flat as the sea on a windless day.

The Third Silence: Aftermath

The third silence is the one we return to. After I leave her, I drive home along the Gold Coast Highway with the windows down. The night air smells of salt and frangipani. I do not replay the evening in my head. I let it dissolve. By the time I park, the memory has become a photograph I will not develop.

The next morning, I water the dying spider plant. I feed Miso. I open a book from the 1890s whose spine has crumbled into dust. I work slowly, patiently, pressing new leather into old shapes. My hands know what to do. The rest of the world does not need to know I have been somewhere else.

In the news, the woman shot dead in that Gold Coast home was known to her attacker. The story was about proximity, about what happens when private life becomes public too fast. I think about her often, not with pity, but with the kind of recognition that comes from living inside a secret. The line between protection and possession is thinner than a blade of glue. I choose to stay on the side of protection. That is the only power I have.

I do not know how long this will last. A year, two, ten. I do not ask. What I know is that I am the lover Gold Coast will never notice, and that is precisely how we both want it. The silence is not emptiness. It is the most honest thing I have.