So, what do you do when you’re about to confront your husband about whether or not he’s having affair?  I mean, what words do you actually say?  I’d never done this before and only ever seen it in the movies – in fact, I’m not even sure I’d ever seen a film about it.  But in a nutshell, I had no idea what to do or say…

Do you dive straight in – “What the f*ck is going on?” Or do you ask questions, setting him up to lie – “Did you have a nice time at your dad’s last night?”.  Do you assume the worst and pack up their things into bin liners ready to chuck them out of the window?  God knows. I even googled it that morning. But in the end, I simply asked him where he’d been, and he answered.

I’m going to describe this in a little more detail because I still have flashbacks about this encounter, and it’s therapeutic for me to write it down.  It was a sort of ‘sliding door’ moment. (Have you seen the film Sliding Doors, when Gwyneth Paltrow runs to catch a tube and in one half of the film she catches the tube and arrives home early to find her husband in bed with someone else, and in the other half of the film, she narrowly misses the tube, and the next tubes are cancelled, and she’s none the wiser?).  What would have happened if he’d lied to me that day?  But the drama that ensued, and how it unfolded, changed the course of my life forever and therefore, it is almost perfectly etched in my brain.

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.”

– Unknown

When I clicked the car tracker button at the crack of dawn on that fateful morning, D and the car weren’t where he’d said they’d be.  He said he was staying an extra night at his dad’s house because he was a bit hung over after meeting some friends the night before.  So, when I found that the car was in a small town not too far from me, my heart hideously stopped beating. And when it started again, pounding frantically, panic set in.  It was awful.

I then watched, correction, I actually tracked our family car as it came home.  It started moving at 8.43am.  So, from 5.50am to 8.43am, I must have refreshed that tracker about a million and one times.  But despite the seemingly endless amount of time it took for D to get home that day, and even as the car pulled into our street, I was still desperately trying to find the right way to confront him.  I couldn’t think straight.  But suddenly there he was, standing right in front of me, in our bedroom.  Panic.

D – “Hello love”.
Me – “Where were you last night?”
D – “At my dad’s”
Me – “No.  You’ve been in ***”
D – “Oh yeah. I met Jon there for a pint.”

I’m standing up from the bed now and he has walked over to me to hold me.  I stare and stare at his eyes until his eyes almost lock into mine, and then I slowly say, “You’ve been in *** for the night and I want you to tell me what’s going on”.  Silence and an eye lock with mine that I will remember forever.  “Tell me”.  Nothing.  “You f*cking tell me”. Silence. Stare. “Tell me”.  Silence. Stare. Silence….

D – “I’m seeing someone”.

And just like that, he says it.  I close my eyes and quiet, painful tears immediately flow down my cheeks, and when I open them because they’re blurred with horror, sadness and confusion, I can hardly see him. Blinking, I can see he is crying too.  He looks desperate.  He’s turned a strange shade of grey, and he grabs my arms to bring me closer to him.

Me – “Who is she?”
D – Silence. “Natalia”

I wriggle to get his hands off me and I step away not wanting to be near him, and also, not wanting to be near her by proxy, for she must have been up close to him like this only moments ago when he was at her house.  Am I going to be able to smell her on him?  Horror.

Me – “Get your hands off me you f*cking a*sehole.” Crying.  Silence.  “How do you know her?”  Can this really be happening to me?
D – “I met her in a night club.”
Me – “When?”
D – “Not sure September…” (3 months earlier)

I have never seen him like this.  He’s crying uncontrollably.  Bent over sobbing and shaking. It feels weird, for he is usually pretty emotionless.  Perhaps I almost feel sorry for him for I am the ‘repair’ person in our marriage but WTF. He’s a total f*cking a*sehole and I can’t even bear to look at him.

I go on to ask him a million and one questions in a dumbstruck but almost an hysterically calm kind of way; tears continuously streaming down my face.  He too continues to sob.  And in between his pathetic answers, he begs and begs me to forgive him, telling me he’ll do anything. He loves me.  He tried to end it.  She means nothing to him. He loves me. She’s the polar opposite to me.  We have a good marriage. We’re meant to be together.  We’re made for each other.  He’ll go to counselling.  He’ll sort himself out. He’ll end it.  He pleads with me.  And on and on it goes.  He’s broken.  I’ve really have never seen him like this before. So desperate, speechless, frail, so panicky and upset. I later learnt that he was also furious.  Furious that he had been found out which was never part of the plan.

But I too am completely and utterly devastated.  Hopelessly confused and my brain is alive with questions.  My body is numb and my face feels frozen with panic. My heart has shattered into a million pieces.

An hour or so passes and we’re still in our bedroom, sat on the bed, side by side about a metre apart, crying.  There are no words to describe this, but I am completely and utterly devastated, and he seems so too.

At times there is a deathly silence, then whispers and sniffles where nothing else in the world matters. Me, occasionally questioning, and him sheepishly answering.

Me – “What am I going to do?”

He tries to touch my knee.

Fury.

Me – “Get your f*cking hands off me you good for nothing price of sh*t”. We’ve got to ring your dad. He doesn’t know what’s going on”.

Earlier, when I found out D wasn’t where he said he was, (namely, at his dad’s house), I had rung his dad to check, and his dad was waiting patiently for an update.

F in law: “Hi F.  It’s early.  You okay?”.
Me: “Is D there?”, I muttered.
F in law: “No. Isn’t he there?”.
Me: “No”, I whimpered.  “He’s in ***.  He spent the night with a lady called Fiona who has a teenage daughter, a dog, and a small business”.
F in law: “What?  What’s going on?  How the hell do you know that?”.
Me: “Because I tracked the car, then looked at the land registry website and looked her up on FB’.  (I had actually found the wrong woman.  I had found the woman that owned the house that Natalia rented, but that’s irrelevant for now).
F in law: “Let’s not jump to conclusions”, he reassured me.  “There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation”.

But both of us had already jumped to the most likely conclusion and, as you know, we weren’t wrong.

That was one of the worst days of my life.  I say ‘one of the worst’ because little did I know, but there were many more ‘worst days’ yet to come.