Eyes opening, too late
On the long drive home from the hotel the sky was a vivid angry pink, streaked with gold, turning a delicate violet and navy at the edges. It was dramatic and beautiful. I felt like I had become a gyroscope, balanced on a narrow point, spinning and close to...
Cheaters will always get caught
Once the wheels came off, in the end, they came off very fast. I was running on empty and caring very little about anything. The summer didn’t even look like summer. Two weeks after X told me about his previous affair, it was my 37th birthday. I had planned,...
Trying, failing, to end the affair
There was nothing that I could do with the information X had given to me. It was too late. I was in too deep. I had nowhere to go with it, no frame of reference. He told me that his previous affair had been several years ago, that his...
The lonely void of adultery
All through the winter and into the spring of my 37th year I fell deeper into the yawning chasm of my entanglement with X. I still felt constantly feverish, like I was going mad. On one level, life continued as it ever had; my eldest daughter made applications to...
Suddenly, I was cheating on my husband
Oh, yeah, no. Of COURSE it wasn’t harmless. Of COURSE I wasn’t making a fun new friend. Of COURSE, X and I were going to have an affair. It was so pathetically obvious, it now seems, to everyone but me. Certainly it was obvious to him – he knew...