Falling down the rabbit hole: Part 1

A year and a half ago, my husband had sex with a female coworker.  At work.  Twice.  Or three times, depending on your definition of sex.

I was completely unaware.

I was deeply in love with my husband and had been for 12 years. We had just celebrated our 10-year anniversary.  We have two children.  He was my best friend.  As far as I knew, everything was fine.  Everything was just as it had always been.

While the affair (what a stupid, meaningless word) was happening, we were going to Christmas parties, celebrating his birthday, going on Christmas light tours, and going out for family dinners.  We were having sex.  I was absolutely clueless.

I was looking at the cell phone bill and just happened to notice something odd.  I got a weird feeling about a number that kept recurring in my husband’s text message list, and I looked on his phone to see who the number belonged to.  It was someone from his work… innocent enough, as they do a lot of texting to communicate.  What wasn’t innocent, though, was the fact that all of the messages had been deleted from his phone…. all of them.  And there had been hundreds.

I was able to recover enough deleted data from his phone to know that there was definitely something going on between them.  In case you’re wondering, there’s never a legitimate work-related reason for a female coworker to ask your husband:

Or to tell him: 

And with that, I was Alice, and I was falling down, down, down the rabbit hole... 

There was confrontation, denial, more confrontation, more denial, and finally there was a break down. 

He cried like a baby and confessed, and then he started packing a bag.

  

Any time I’d ever played out this scenario in my head, that’s how it would’ve gone.  Get the fuck out of my house, you cheating bastard.  But suddenly, instead of letting him walk out, letting him walk away from the devastation he had just caused, I said, No way.  Fuck that.  You don’t get to walk away.  

Who was going to take care of these children of ours while I was trying to pick myself up off the ground and breathe?  If anyone was leaving, I was.  But where would I have gone?  Somewhere to lick my wounds all alone, maybe, or to a friend’s house to be fawned over and pitied?  No thank you.  

Aside from that, though, I needed to hear it.  I had to know.  When, where, how often, what positions...  I wanted him to relive every single soul-crushing, marriage-killing act he had committed.  I couldn’t even try to wrap my head around the question of why until I knew the rest of it.